Davide Vecchi: AI imperialism and the prospects of data-centred and automated natural science

Tuesday November 17 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
AI is imperialistic because it encroaches upon any human endeavour, including scientific research. AI’s epistemic imperialism is fast-paced, encompassing and ground breaking, as testified by the recent encroachment on mathematics. In the natural sciences, it is founded on an old-fashioned empiricist gamble dressed up in new clothes: using current databases to extract inferences through automated processing, dispensing of obscure causes and mechanistic insight. The irony is that the outcomes of AI-based automation are often obscure, compromising human intelligibility. A chief example of AI-based natural science is AlphaFold. It is often suggested that AlphaFold has solved the protein folding problem, one of the major theoretical problems in the life sciences. I shall first illustrate the nature of AlphaFold’s contribution to biochemistry. I shall then highlight some of its limitations and some of the problems that it engenders. On this basis, I shall turn to the more general issue concerning the prospects of data-centred automation, particularly in other life sciences. I end up by raising some general questions: is the hype concerning AI-based science justified? Is there a difference between encroaching on mathematics or on the natural sciences? What is the scope of AI-based natural science? And is the new empiricist gamble justified?

Bio
Davide Vecchi studied philosophy at the University of Bologna (Italy) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom). Before joining the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Sciences of the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) in Madrid (Spain), Davide worked at the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Universidad de Santiago (Chile), as well as being Research Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Austria). Davide is interested in historical, philosophical, theoretical, social and ethical issues stemming from the life sciences.