Reflections from the Nobel Prize Dialogue Seoul 2026
By Bill Maloney, Guest Writer, Red Planet Bound
This past Sunday, I attended the “Nobel Prize Dialogue Seoul 2026” as a representative
of The Mars Society’s Mars Technology Institute (MTI). The theme of the event was “AI’s Impact
on the Future of Science.” The event featured many distinguished minds, including those at the
forefront of the development of artificial intelligence (AI), which is changing the world as we
know it at an ever-increasing speed. Nobel laureates also featured prominently in the program,
as Craig Mello, a 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Brian P. Schmidt, a 2011
Nobel Laureate in Physics, and David MacMillan, a 2021 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, each
provided great insights into how AI might impact science and humanity.
Dr. Jin-Ho Chung, the president of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology,
brilliantly began the event with opening remarks that helped give the audience perspective
regarding the immense unfolding shift that is occurring because of AI. He asked “How does
discovery happen?,” saying that the answer, until now, has been humans. Furthermore, Dr.
Chung implored us to “ask what it means to be a good scientist in the age of AI,” while also
reminding us that “science has always begun with a good question.” In settling Mars and other
parts of space in this new age of AI, we must always have these words of Dr. Chung’s at the
top of our minds.
I think that being a good scientist now means what it has always meant and will always
mean: possessing what the next speaker, Hanna Stjärne, executive director of the Nobel
Foundation, said are “the human qualities that drive discovery forward, such as curiosity,
judgment, and the ability to ask the right questions will remain important.” I also think that Dr.
Schmidt’s comments in the panel “Where are we going with AI,” in which he said that “human
accountability is at the forefront of what we need to be thinking” is part of what it means to be
a good scientist, as it always has. Scientists partake in a beautiful process of discovery, the
process bringing forth and strengthening our best attributes. They also have tremendous
power to change the world, and thus tremendous obligations.
Scientists’ responsibilities are extremely important to consider when we speak of
settling space. Scientific developments drastically change society here on Earth. When we
settle space, we will be creating new societies. Science, its possibilities and limitations, and
our understanding of it will partially determine what we can do in space and how soon, but it is
our human traits, our creativity, resilience, and ethics, that will ultimately determine what we do
in space.
All of humanity should benefit from humanity’s journey of exploring the stars and
beyond. AI is a tool that is necessary for us to use to explore and settle space. However, it is
not necessary that space exploration and settlement benefit only a select few. Dr. Mello said in
the panel “Who is most likely to benefit from AI-enabled science?” that “some things are
fundamentally going to have to change in order to make sure that AI and its rewards, the way
that it helps advance society is shared appropriately.” I absolutely agree. We also need to make
sure that not only are its rewards on the back end shared appropriately, but that the award of
participating in the great challenge of exploring and settling space is also shared appropriately.
We need all the help we can get.
In the same panel, Dr. Alison Noble, a professor at the University of Oxford and the
Royal Society’s vice president and foreign secretary, said that “we need to find mechanisms to
reward teams” that are cross-disciplinary. We need large teams that combine different areas of
expertise in imaginative ways to explore what we can do. Dr. Noble said that “by scientists
coming together and opening their minds as to some of the questions that we can now look
at.” I think that such a cross-disciplinary approach is what makes The Mars Society and MTI so
incredible.
One obstacle to us realizing our potential in using AI collaboratively is how undertrained
it is in certain languages and topics. Dr. Alice Oh, a professor at KAIST, said that “it’s pretty
obvious that these generative AI models have advanced for a few major languages and not so
much for the rest of the languages in the world.” However, she said she was “hopeful” that
models could be trained on more languages so as to foster more collaboration between
scientists globally. Related to this is the potential language drift that could happen when we
settle space. A language drift would require models to be trained with the language used by
these settlers. Additionally, I think that the models need to be trained on the science of the
planets and other areas of space. Two notable examples of what models should be trained on
are Martian gravity, which is 38% of Earth’s, and Martian atmospheric pressure, which is 0.6%
of Earth’s. Moreover, another thing that has to be addressed are models’ scientific reasoning
capabilities, which are currently very limited.
Dr. MacMillan spoke with profound wisdom in the panel titled “Balancing risks with
benefits: what do we stand to lose?” He expressed his concern that scientists will universally
decide to pursue “grand challenges and move away from these completely orthogonal fields
which grow out of nothing where there’s no data on which to have a premise that there’s a
pattern on which you can gain from it,” adding that “I really worry about the idea are we going
to become too fixated on problems we’ve already identified versus problems we don’t even
know exist which could become fields, extremely important fields, really quickly.”
Serendipitous scientific discoveries include insulin, penicillin, x-rays, nuclein (after
further scientific research, nuclein is now referred to as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA), and Dr.
Mello’s Nobel Prize winning discovery of RNA interference. Dr. Mello said, in the next panel,
where he and the other two Nobel laureates shared their closing thoughts, that “we discovered
something totally by accident. So, it’s hard to say that AI could have helped us because it
probably would have been telling us that it was absolutely impossible” and to not believe his
data.
I think that it is imperative that we protect the role of serendipity in science. Going one
step further, I think that we should seek to accelerate serendipity, a topic that Dr. MacMillan
has written about. There is so much that we don’t know about space. We shouldn’t leave any
stone unturned. In fact, we should seek to learn from what doesn’t work. Dr. Noble remarked in
the “Balancing risks with benefits: what do we stand to lose?” panel that “we don’t publish
negative results and so that means AI is built on positive results. So, it’s really been questioned
what are the implications of this?” AI models should be built with negative results. In fact, it
was the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment that served as the foundation for Albert
Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
There is an incredible amount of potential with AI. We simply have to harness it
responsibly and at the right pace. Dr. Schmidt said in his closing remarks that we “have to put
a huge amount of effort into keeping the good side of AI going” and that “we should not just
assume that the downside of AI is not going to be a problem.” Additionally, he said that “we
may have to slow AI down a bit so that we can keep up with it and we can put up appropriate
guardrails.” This, in my opinion, is the correct approach to take with AI. We should use it to
bring us towards a promising future. I believe that if we have the capability to invent AI and to
make world changing scientific discoveries, then we also have the capability to responsibly use
AI. Handing over science to AI, becoming reliant on it, letting it give us answers without us
understanding the answers and allowing it to define the parameters within which we can
explore, would fall short of what it means to be a scientist, as would, too, refusing to use this
powerful tool out of fear of it or not putting in place guardrails that protect humanity. Scientists,
throughout the ages, have used their brilliance, courage, and ethics to change the world. More
than the science itself, how we participate in science is what defines us as scientists. Our
brilliance, courage, and ethics will help us settle new worlds in space.
It is conversations like those that took place at the “Nobel Prize Dialogue Seoul 2026”
that make me optimistic about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on science and
humanity.
Image: Dr. David MacMillan, a 2021 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, with this article’s author after the Nobel Prize Dialogue Seoul 2026.
