By Rewarding AI, the Nobel Prize Has Become a Popularity Contest. The Truth Is, It Always Has Been

“AI everywhere.”

“Really? That’s not even physics!”

“It feels like the scientific counterpart to Bob Dylan winning the Literature Prize: well-deserved, but with a dose of, ‘Wait, what?’”

These are just a few of the many reactions to the decision by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Everything suggests the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences expected this reaction. The first paragraph of the explanatory memorandum stated, “With artificial neural networks, the boundaries of physics are extended to host phenomena of life as well as computation.”

It didn’t help much. Suspicions arose within seconds of the announcement that the most prestigious prize in contemporary hard sciences was going to a cognitive psychologist. What was the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences doing? Was it jumping on the AI hype wave to avoid becoming outdated? Had the Nobel Prize turned into a popularity contest?

The answer to all these questions is in the same vein. The organization is obviously going in all on AI. Of course it’s a popularity contest. But no, it’s not just a popularity contest beginning this year, it’s always been one.

The legacy, the damned legacy. One day in 1888, a French newspaper announced, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” It wasn’t true—it was his brother, Ludvig Nobel, who had died. But the headline would haunt him for years.

While Nobel had invented dynamite, the idea of being remembered as a “warlord” or something similar deeply unsettled him.

Halfway between red carpets and laboratories, the Nobel Prizes have played an essential role in shaping how contemporary societies view science, art, and humanitarian efforts. But let’s face it: The world’s most prestigious awards have also been a gigantic marketing and personal branding campaign since their inception.

And that explains a lot—almost everything. It explains why Nobel created a peace prize, and it also explains why he decided to recognize three specific areas of science for the awards (medicine, physics, and chemistry). These were the branches that generated the most hype at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only problem is that the world has changed significantly since the beginning of the 20th century. The Nobel Foundation has known this for years. While it isn’t the only reason, it has created new categories—such as the economics prize—to compete with other awards trying to position themselves as the “Nobel” of their discipline.

But the Nobel Foundation has also pushed the boundaries of its existing distinctions.

“Like a Rolling Stone.” The best example is the Nobel Prize in Literature, which in 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan (as the X user I mentioned earlier recalled). But that’s not the only case. In 2020, for a more contemporary example, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for CRISPR-Cas9. This gene-editing technology allows scientists to modify the DNA sequence of a cell.

Experts and the general public alike sensed this was a Nobel-worthy discovery (much like gravitational waves, which earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics). Still, for years, many wondered, would it be recognized in Chemistry or Medicine? Ultimately, the distinction didn’t matter much, but the debate highlighted an important issue: In a world where knowledge is increasingly specialized and diverse, the Nobel categories aren’t always a perfect fit.

What happened? The Nobel Prizes have become the world’s most prestigious recognition of scientific and artistic achievement—and they want to keep it that way.

Image | Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library | Xataka On

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