By Akhil Bhardwaj
Publication Date: 2025-12-01 17:33:00
Donald Trump’s new “Genesis Mission” initiative promises to use artificial intelligence to reinvent the way science is done, tackling the biggest challenges in areas such as robotics, biotechnology and nuclear fusion.
It envisions a system in which AI designs, conducts experiments, learns from the results, and continually suggests new research directions. The hope is that this will lead to significantly higher productivity in government-funded research.
This vision fits with a broader international trend, including in the UK: governments are investing heavily in AI for science, pointing to successes such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures and is now embedded in many areas of biology and drug discovery.
But core lessons from the philosophy of science show why “automating discovery” is far more difficult – and riskier – than the rhetoric suggests.
The philosopher Karl Popper famously described science as a process of “bold guesses and…”
