Computer invents new scientific theory without human help for the first time

The mystery of how flatworms regenerate has been solved independently by a computer(Max Delbrück Center)

One of biology's biggest mysteries - how a sliced up flatworm can regenerate into new organisms - has been solved independently by a computer. The discovery marks the first time that a computer has come up with a new scientific theory without direct human help.

The computer invented an accurate model of the inner-workings of a flatworm(UoM)

Computer scientists from the University of Maryland programmed a computer to randomly predict how a worm's genes formed a regulatory network capable of regeneration, before evaluating these predictions through simulation.

After three days of continuously predicting, simulating and evaluating, the computer was able to come up with a core genetic network that explained how the worm's regeneration took place.
The study by Daniel Lobo and Michael Levin, Inferring Regulatory Networks from Experimental Morphological Phenotypes, was published on Thursday (4 June) in the journal PLOS.

"It's not just statistics or number-crunching," Levin told Popular Mechanics. "The invention of models to explain what nature is doing is the most creative thing scientists do. This is the heart and soul of the scientific enterprise. None of us could have come up with this model; we (as a field) have failed to do so after over a century of effort."

Lobo and Levin are now applying the trial-and-error approach to creating scientific models and theories in different areas, including cancer research.

The pair believe that the approach can be used to better understand the process of metastasis, which causes cancer to spread through the body.

However, despite the computer only taking three days to create the worm model, it took the scientists several years to put together the program.
In order to transfer the computer's abilities to other areas, massive databases of scientific experiments would need to be prepared in order to have enough raw material for discoveries to be made.

"This problem, and our approach, is nearly universal," Levin said. "It can be used with anything, where functional data exist but the underlying mechanism is hard to guess.

"As long as you tweak the formal language, build the database of facts in your field, and provide an appropriate simulator, the whole scheme can be used for many, man applications."

ORIGINAL: International Business Times

By Anthony Cuthbertson 

June 5, 2015

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Reveals Why Robots Really Are Coming For Your Job

REUTERS/Robert Pratta

Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has a new NBER paper out that comes to a worrying conclusion — the robots really are coming for your job.

In economic theory innovation should make workers more efficient — they can produce more for less — but it comes at the cost of lower skilled jobs as fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output.

However, (again in theory) the gains made by workers who remain in employment should be greater than the losses incurred by those who lose their jobs and their gains help drive more skilled job creation in other industries.

Unfortunately theory doesn't always fit neatly when confronted by reality. And Stiglitz claims this is exactly what has happened with innovation. As he puts it (emphasis added):

"The statement that such skill-biased innovation could be welfare enhancing is usually taken to mean that the gains of the skilled workers are more than sufficient to compensate the losses of the unskilled workers. But while the skilled workers could compensate the unskilled workers, such compensation seldom occurs."

Stiglitz argues that truly disruptive innovations, of the kind that drove the Industrial Revolution, require widespread economic restructuring to allow those who are being pushed out of an industry to locate alternatives. Sadly, he says, "markets often do not manage such restructurings well" leading to long periods of high unemployment and increased inequality.

The economist claims that these market failures helped create the conditions for the Great Depression. Banks and businesses failed to anticipate the collapse of rural workers' incomes driven by technological changes in the farming sector in the 1920s. The legacy of this was a debt overhang that prevented these workers from moving to cities in order to gain new skills and ultimately caused a crash in demand.

AP Images Joseph Stiglitz

If left unchecked, the decline in manufacturing during the present era could be having a similarly worrying impact. Worse, without government introducing policy to counteract the impact of labour-saving innovation low income workers could end up being worse off "even in the longer run" with lower wages and higher unemployment concentrated among some of the most vulnerable groups in society.

Indeed this may help explain why wages of low-skilled workers in the US have stagnated for more than 40 years.

For more than a century the Luddites, who believed that modern machines would lead to unemployment and impoverishment, have been held up as an example of how small-minded traditionalists hold up social and economic progress. In short, Stiglitz's message is that they were in fact right.

ORIGINAL: Business Insider

TOMAS HIRST

NOV. 13, 2014, 2:00 PM