You are mischaracterize what's happening entirely. The article is not whining and it's not claiming that this is somehow shaking the foundations of science. But we are potentially in the middle (or even at the end) of a monumental shift inside physics. Particle physics produced fantastic discoveries over the second half of the twentieth century and it might just have hit a major major wall (or in the lingo of the field, encountered a desert) where we can not expect new discoveries in the next decades or centuries.
If that's so it will mean a major restructuring of the field of physics. It has vast implications for researchers that chose what to work on or whom to fund. Yes it's all part of research, but the flavor and type of research in one of the most prominent fields of science is undergoing a massive shift. That's news that's well suited for a publication called Science. And it reflects genuine scientific debate that's been going on for more than a decade on the inside.
> In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives." He concluded that nothing being done in AI couldn't be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", which implied that many of AI's most successful algorithms would grind to a halt on real world problems and were only suitable for solving "toy" versions.[15]
> The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in England.[15] AI research continued in only a few universities (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex).
In retrospect it was at least arguably the right call, no? Suspend most research and resume when available processing power was orders of magnitude greater, a process that was independently driven by demands other than (and much greater than) AI research.
Playing devil's advocate only slightly, maybe particle physics should similarly pare down to a bare maintenance level of research (or even mostly teaching) for a few centuries until we can harness much higher energies.
They were right; modern ML doesn’t use any of the ideas the previous generation of AI people were pursuing. It turns out no expert system is a match for just doing a bunch of matrix multiplications.
If that's so it will mean a major restructuring of the field of physics. It has vast implications for researchers that chose what to work on or whom to fund. Yes it's all part of research, but the flavor and type of research in one of the most prominent fields of science is undergoing a massive shift. That's news that's well suited for a publication called Science. And it reflects genuine scientific debate that's been going on for more than a decade on the inside.