Jeff Clune

Abstract The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in artificial intelligence (AI) research1,2. Although the community has made substantial progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research life cycle—from conception to publication—has remained out of reach. Here we present a pipeline for automating the entire scientific process end to end.

Jeff Clune is an associate professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. Money-grabbing scams have been happening for longer than we can remember: con artistry, Ponzi schemes, online phishing, even snail mail gambits. But the advent of more sophisticated artificial intelligence will soon make these tricks far more common, complex and convincing.

A NOTE ON THE ART: The illustrations in this piece were created by Maclean’s art director Anna Minzhulina using the generative AI image program Imagine. Minzhulina spent weeks feeding prompts into the program, inspired by the essays. It was barely a year ago that artificial intelligence still seemed safely boxed away into the realm of “let’s worry about that later.” But, as with climate change and political extremism, the hypothetical has quickly (and scarily) morphed into the concrete.