A.I.’s Sweep Reignites Debate Over Whether It’s Time to Modernize the Nobel Prizes

A.I. is having a moment at this year’s Nobel Prizes. Earlier this week, the award for physics was granted to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, two pioneering A.I. researchers who made breakthroughs in training artificial neural networks. The following day, DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with the American biochemist David Baker, for developing an A.I. model that’s able to predict the structure of virtually all proteins.

Some scientists, including the awardees themselves, were left shocked by A.I.’s dominance this year. Hinton said he was “flabbergasted” by the honor and noted in a subsequent press conference that he didn’t necessarily consider himself a physicist. “I have very high respect for physics. I dropped out of physics after my first year at university because I couldn’t do the complicated math, so getting an award in physics was very surprising to me,” he said.

To some, the new technology’s presence at the prestigious scientific prizes displayed the sheer force of its impact on all fields, including science. While Huimin Zhao, chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Observer he was “very surprised” to learn about the A.I. focus of the chemistry prize, the scientist described Hassabis and Jumper’s AlphaFold A.I. program as “revolutionary.” The 2020 breakthrough from the duo solved a problem scientists had been working on for 50 years and is arguably “the biggest application of A.I. in the science domain,” said Zhao.

The Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized Hinton and Hopfield for decades of work that laid the foundation for today’s A.I. revolution, is an award that “celebrates interdisciplinary,” said Michael Moloney, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, in a statement. Honoring how physics has driven the development of computational algorithms, it also “demonstrates that fundamental shifts in our scientific understanding can sometimes take decades to have wider impact,” he said.

Is it time for the Nobel Prizes to update its categories?

Despite the achievements of the new Nobel Prize laureates, this year’s awards have reignited debates over whether the Nobel Prizes should modernize their categories to reflect current scientific fields. Hinton himself noted in an interview that his work would be more appropriate for a Nobel Prize in computer science. Hassabis, meanwhile, pointed to the fact that the concept of computer science didn’t even exist when the awards were first created more than 100 years ago.

The prizes have remained in accordance with the wishes set out in the 1895 will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who requested that his estate be used to fund annual prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, peace and literature. The Nobel Foundation, which manages Nobel’s fortune, has given no indication that it is willing to change these categories and describes the 1968 addition of an award for economic sciences as “an exception.”

Unlike the other awards, the economics prize is funded by Sveriges Riksbank—Sweden’s central bank—and is not an official Nobel Prize but instead labeled a prize “in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” Its establishment coincided with the celebration of Sveriges Riksbank’s 300th anniversary, said the bank in a statement to Observer.

This isn’t the first time the scientific community has urged the Nobel Prizes to add new honors. In 2009, a group of researchers and academics including Tim Hunt, a 2001 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology and medicine, wrote a letter to the Nobel Foundation requesting it adapt to recognize emerging disciplines like global environment and public health, fundamental biology and behavioral science. “We appreciate that the foundation is bound by Nobel’s will. But we also note that the foundation has shown flexibility in the past,” read the letter, which didn’t result in any new additions.

While A.I.’s sweep at this year’s awards is unlikely to spur any significant changes in the prizes themselves, researchers say they will give the new technology’s capabilities across science further credibility. The back-to-back prizes in physics and chemistry will inspire more scientists to utilize A.I., according to Zhao. “Now, we’ve started to realize the potential of A.I. for scientific discoveries,” he said. “I would say this is the beginning.”