"Today, human ingenuity is expressed through the machines we create. Almost every big scientific breakthrough of the past 50 years, from detecting gravitational waves to sequencing the human genome and mapping the structure of proteins with artificial intelligence (AI) tools, has depended on a machine that could sense more, measure more precisely or calculate faster than any human can. Yet, prestigious scientific prizes still frame achievements mainly as a human endeavour."
"Although Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves 100 years earlier using just his imagination, paper and a pen, their observation hinged on an engineering feat that could be achieved only in the past few decades: two tunnels, each four kilometres long, perfectly perpendicular, under ultrahigh vacuum, equipped with laser beams capable of detecting length variations with a precision of 1/10,000th the width of a proton."
Human dominance arose from ingenuity—an ability to imagine, design and build—rather than from raw strength or speed. Modern ingenuity is embodied in machines that extend sensing, measurement and computation beyond human limits. Many major scientific breakthroughs of recent decades have depended on such machines and on the communities that designed and built them. Prestigious awards frequently credit individuals while overlooking these machines and engineering efforts. Recognizing machines as co-creators could take the form of adapting existing awards, adding new categories, or creating fresh prizes to reflect machine-enabled discovery.
Read at Nature
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