Abstract
New scientific knowledge is needed more urgently than ever, to address
global challenges such as climate change, sustainability, health and
societal well-being. Could artificial intelligence (AI) accelerate the
scientific process to meet global challenges in time? AI is already
revolutionizing individual scientific disciplines, but we argue here
that it could be more holistic and encompassing. We introduce the
concept of \textit{virtual laboratories} as a new
perspective on scientific knowledge generation and a means to
incentivize new AI research and development. Despite the often perceived
domain-specific research practices and inherent tacit knowledge, we
argue that many elements of the research process generalize across
scientific domains, and that it is possible to build a common software
layer that serves different domains and provides AI assistance. We
outline how virtual laboratories will make it easier for AI researchers
to contribute to a broad range of scientific domains, and highlight the
mutual benefits virtual laboratories offer to both AI and domain
scientists.