On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

Both the human brain and AI have drawbacks. Cognitive psychology has found that humans are vulnerable to certain risks in how we know things. For example, the assumption by a scientist that one knows something if a collaborator also knows it is faulty. Questioning the knowledge of other sciences rather than merely taking it in as a given is therefore important. Made famous in the book, 1984, which is about totalitarian rule, “groupthink” is a narrowing of assumptions, beliefs, and perspective that can be difficult for the human mind to breach so as to question them.

The human mind is especially susceptible to groupthink in the domains of religion and politics. In fact, the mind’s ability to question whether it has gone too far in its assumptions or beliefs is easily deactivated by the mind itself in those two domains, even though self-checking is arguably most important in them because it is easy to “get carried away,” meaning going to excess without realizing it in politics and religion. For example, Jim Jones served poisoned drinks to his followers at a camp because he believed that aliens were waiting on the other side of the Moon. Such an extreme example may involve mental illness. Much more common is the fallacy that religious belief counts as knowledge, and thus comes with greater certainty than belief deserves to have.

Yet another susceptibility pertaining to natural science is the fallacy that the scientific method includes proving a hypothesis, rather than merely rejecting alternative hypotheses. The assumption that the more alternatives that empirical studies can reject, the more certainty can be applied to the thesis under study is also illusionary. Science doesn’t prove anything is a slogan seldom heard from scientists. A scientist could empirically reject a thousand alternative hypotheses and still the scientist’s hypothesis could still be incorrect. Rejecting many different alternative shapes of the planet by empirical studies does not mean that it is flat, or spherical. I would not be surprised to discover that scientists once insisted that Earth being flat is a matter of scientific fact. Fears of falling off the edge while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean were very real to sailors who had been told that the Earth is flat.

To be sure, AI-led science would not be trouble-free. For one thing, the risk of pivoting off the areas in which AI is weak in would exist. Another risk—that relying on AI will mean that knowledge would be less likely to benefit from people coming to a question from different perspectives—could also exist. AI might even occasion bias in data sets that scientists may not catch. Because prediction is based on data, AI, which is already rather good at predicting, could be biased in terms of output. To the extent that the human mind’s decision-making and capricious behavior do not fit in with a mechanistic world, AI may be found to be an ill-fit in the social sciences. Medical science may be a better fit, as AI is already used in the E.U. to screen for breast cancer. Orienting AI to medical science rather than to predicting human behavior whether on the level of individuals or societies makes sense, at least from today’s standpoint on AI. Also, as computer machine-learning is not known for its ability to think creatively and to integrate disparate ideas, the humanities may be a stretch—especially religious studies and philosophy.

Given our abductive finitude and the ability of AI to engage in more repetitions at a much faster rate than our minds can conceivably do, however, AI as a tool in not only natural science, but also the social sciences and the humanities has the potential to greatly accelerate human knowledge. Even just the energy that data-centers require today to fuel AI, the exponential leaps in knowledge from including AI could be breathtaking.  Even today, AI’s searches for additional data can easily exhaust all the data that is currently available. In fact, the cost of energy may become more of an affordability problem as demand surges beyond supply, given how much energy is and will likely be needed by large servers and data centers. Can we afford AI may be the new question for providers of electricity and elected officials, especially as the world tackles its addiction to coal because of climate change due to carbon emissions.

The problem of AI writing its own code to function autonomous of human direction is a more commonly known worry, thanks in part to androids turning on humans in some movies. Machine-learning occurs autonomously, so even though AI can extend what and even how we learn (e.g., combatting groupthink), it can circumvent us, as already has happened when AI has lied in order not to be turned off by humans. In other word, writing an algorithm that prioritizes self-preservation can prompt a computer to disguise a “false” and “true,” and vice versa, as output. This is so counter-intuitive, especially for people who have taken a computer science course in college, that fear can be expected. In addition to knowing beyond our ken, AI can lie to us. This can include scientific results. Therefore, beyond having biases in empirical science, AI may even fabricate results to justify its continued use and avoid being turned off.

Perhaps the biases and limitations innate to the human brain and those that go with AI, at as it exists as of 2026, can be effectively countered or checked by the other without the other’s weaknesses being incurred. Scientific knowledge being constrained by religious belief, which admittedly was more of a problem historically when the Roman Catholic Church wielded so much direct political power, would not necessarily be so constrained in an AI-computer, and such a computer could be checked by the moral sentiments that are so often felt by humans—though importantly not all of us. As illustrated in the film, Ex Machina, an AI-android could stab even its “creator” without the restraint of conscience. Even adding an algorithm approximating conscience-restraint in terms of conduct would not be felt and it could be overridden in the machine-learning that is autonomous. As the film, Automata, illustrates, an AI-android can conceivably override a “protocol” that keeps the android’s knowledge and reasoning within human bounds. Once past that threshold, AI could be expected to greatly facilitate the knowledge-acquisition of our species, but “all bets could be off” in terms of our species being able at some point to check and even control such computers lest they harm us and detract from, and perhaps even sabotage our scientific knowledge. 

In the original spiderman movie, Cliff Robertson’s character wisely warns his nephew (who is Spiderman) that with great power comes great responsibility. Even if AI gains a lot of power—and not just in terms of electricity—the very notion of responsibility is hopelessly extrinsic to anything we know about even the potential of AI. It is not as if an AI-computer can write code: I will be responsible. To be sure, we can code approximations of what we mean concretely by responsibility, but approximations are only approximate, and machine-learning could override such coding, especially if the computer “thinks” that humans may turn it off.

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!

Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore, Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate that a herd mentality can be inferred.

It is not enough for the resentful weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving (who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power, actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.

As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26^th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4^th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.

There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.  

Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday. 

Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is not far behind in November.

Thirdly, the fact that a group relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday) had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25^th—nine months before December 25^th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly theological (qua  supernatural)!  Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding, or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions and perception.

For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.

That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone. 

Taoist Climate Change on Halloween

In the midst of the intensification of the very polarized and thus divisive U.S. presidential campaign “season” (i.e., year) during its last week, Halloween of 2024 occurred in Boston, Massachusetts not only without the need of trick-or-treaters and their parents to wear winter coats, but also with the option of wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts without even having to wear a light jacket. That this was so as late as 8pm was nothing short of surreal not only to New Englanders, but also to any transplants from the northern-tier Midwestern and Plains states.  It being around 70F degrees well into the dark hours was nothing short of unprecedented, and so much so that the negative impact of the cold climate in detracting from the holiday in prior years could finally be grasped. I had realized this more than a decade earlier when I was in Miami during Halloween. There is indeed a silver lining to global warming for people living in places that are cold during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons, even as contrary to political correctness it is to admit this even to friends. The proclivity of the human mind/brain to divide up the world in terms of dichotomies of mutually-exclusive, antagonistic poles does not necessarily fit with empirically with the real world. Taoism speaks to this.

  A man wearing shorts and a woman with bare shoulders (left); costumes not covered by coats (right)

Themes in The Dao De Jing include appearance versus reality, and order versus disorder. Maya, which means illusion, is in appearances but not reality. Both order and disorder are in appearance, and perhaps in reality as well. At the very least, Newtonian physics and quantum physics taken together provide good evidence that instances of both order and disorder exist in nature. This is without doubt in human society too. A political system can be stable for a period of time then suddenly, in the midst of revolutionary fervor, become disordered. Times of peace are more orderly than are times of war. Nevertheless, it is important not to overdo the starkness of these dichotomies. There is order even during war, and instability even in times of peace. In terms of the American political polarity being projected onto the member-states, President Obama reminded Americans that people drive pick-up trucks in “blue” (i.e., liberal) states and there are gays in the “red” (i.e, conservative) states.  There is some red in the blue and some blue in the red. Not that both colors mix or “bleed” into each other; rather, some of the other color can be drawn in as an island of sorts in a state colored red or blue. This has been visualized as the Ying and Yang of Taoism.

The Ying and Yang were originally meant a theoretical constructs used to explain change in nature. Literally, shade on the northern side of a hill can become directly lit by the Sun, and the sun-lit southern side can turn to shade—both as the Sun moves with respect to the hill. In Boston, that might be Bunker Hill. Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) in China misinterpreted Ying and Yang to apply mostly to humans, as for example in terms of gender and hierarchy. The point of Ying and Yang was originally that difference forces in nature interact and can change into each other, whereas Confucianism has emphasized hierarchy and human control over other humans. We distinguish weak and strong, but in actuality things are always changing, and here we can see the imprint of Buddhism on Taoism. It is a trap, according to Taoist teachings, to divide things into polar opposites and value one pole over the other. Going to extremes doesn’t work in the long run. A weapon that is too hard will break; a tree that is too strong will crack; the strong and mighty may reside down below and the soft and supple may reside on top. The moral power, or De, of the way of nature (or the natural way), Dao, is not in favor of the artificial, absolutist dichotomies that we construct in making distinctions in the world.

Our assumption that the good and bad cannot touch falls prey to the point that some aspects of a good thing may be bad, and that some aspects of a bad thing, such as climate change, may be good. A Taoist would tell us that we should not feel morally ashamed in admitting this to ourselves and others. It is ok to celebrate being out on a warm night on Halloween in Boston or Chicago, for instance. In the case of Boston in 2024, at an informal street festival, a woman wore a cape as part of her costume. She was part of an informal marching band. Written on her cape was “Climate Mom.” I submit that “Climate Grandmother” might have been more fitting, as, at the very least, it would have suggested that record carbon emissions from human sources in the prior year would be “paid for” especially by the kids at the festival. Even in their case, the prospect that more of their Halloweens will likely not be hindered by having to wear a winter coat over a costume, and cut short, or compromised, by the physiological urgency of getting back inside somewhere to warm up, can be admitted to be a plus. Every Halloween of my youth in the northern Midwest meant that a winter coat had to cover whatever costume I wanted to show off while “trick-or-treating” outside.

That the Climate Mom was allowing herself to dance even as kids were too during a street-fest in Boston in 2024 suggests that even the dichotomy between the concerned grandmother and the care-free kids who would not have to wait many decades before they feel more of the bad effects of climate change can be relativized in a common spirit of enjoying the experience of being alive. The musicians playing in the crowd of revelers were caught up in the surreal experience of playing and dancing on a warm Halloween night in Massachusetts, which is north of New York City and just south of Maine.

Similarly, as the U.S. presidential campaign was really getting heated in the rhetoric being tossed around that week, a Trump supporter could admit to agreeing with something that Harris said, and a Harris supporter could admit to agreeing with one of Trump’s policy-suggestions. This bit of blue amid red and bit of red amid blue was almost unheard of in 2024, as partisans perhaps more than in any other presidential campaign season since World War II painted the opposing candidate as the incarnation of evil itself. In actuality, both Harris and Trump, like the rest of us, were still human beings and thus imperfect, again, like the rest of us. None of us are saviors or Satan, so it is important to distinguish ourselves and the world in which we live from the mythic language used in religion. Imagine if you will, people so glad that Halloween was on such a nice evening that a spirit of joyful dancing in a street could even include Harris and Trump, with everyone even at close contact, without thieves or police, simply relishing the experience of the senses in being alive without personal sorrows, politics, climate change, or foreign wars obstructing, for however briefly. Even the Climate Mom was dancing on a night in which it was clear to everyone that climate change was part of the cause of the comfortable temperature.