New Delhi: AI is transforming every profession, even astrophysicists aren’t spared. These students of the stars are now questioning if they will be the last of their kind to research the universe without advanced AI tools.
In an article titled The Last Astronomers, in the reputed magazine Science, Joshua Sokol looked into how AI has changed astronomy.
Astronomy is a field that relies heavily on data analysis, mathematics, coding, and pattern recognition—tasks which AI excels at.
What was once the hard work of researchers can now easily be delegated to AI systems like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and specialised agents that can comb through scientific literature, write code, analyse data, draft proposals for telescope functioning, generate research ideas, and even solve long-standing scientific problems.
Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard astronomer, spent several years trying to understand how the spiral arms of a distant galaxy were moving. ChatGPT solved the problem in a few minutes and will now allow her team to write several research papers about it.
While research itself has sped up, some researchers are even using AI to generate publishable papers within weeks. Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz claimed that he could even teach Claude to be as capable as a postdoctoral-level student within a year. This might lead to AI models that may easily outperform physicists, cosmologists, and researchers.
Every field of scientific research is facing a similar risk—a loss of opportunities for graduate students, a flood of AI-generated papers. The worst part is that the pursuit of science becomes an activity for the machines rather than humans.
Why we research
In the middle of all this AI-induced anxiety, Sokol spoke to researchers who are questioning why humans pursue science at all.
Answers and solutions are only one facet of scientific research, and several academics argue scientific training itself has value. Being able to understand the universe, and participate in creating that understanding has a value of its own.
With AI entering the field, students could become overly dependent on it, caution some scientists. Minas Karamanis, a cosmology postdoc, argued that struggling with questions without easily available answers is an essential part of being a researcher.
“Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. You haven’t saved time. You’ve forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you,” Karamanis told Science.
However, there are also researchers who believe that science is about the pursuit of truth, and if AI can make that process faster and more efficient, then scientists would embrace it.
“What I love is to chase the truth. Pretending, ‘Let’s cover the truth so people feel like they can discover it’—it’s very narcissistic, in a way,” Cecilia Garraffo, a researcher at the Centre for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, told Science.
The entry of AI is uniquely disturbing to a few researchers. Raphael Martinez-Galarza of the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard, Smithsonian, told Science that astronomy and cosmology got their allure because they were at their core a pursuit for meaning.
“I see value in the process of matter turning into neurons trying to understand itself. I think it’s beautiful—it’s almost poetic,” he told Science. For him, science is that process, it is a social activity “by and for humans”.
He doesn’t see the point of rushing to understand the universe if it means letting go of the delight in working through the questions himself.
Source – https://theprint.in/feature/astrophysicists-are-asking-if-ai-will-take-away-their-jobs/2956371/