What was once dismissed as speculation, machines that do science, cells programmed like software, consciousness measured and perhaps replicated, is now edging from possibility to probability. The question is no longer whether the old certainties will fracture, but how soon, and how profoundly.

This cluster of near-horizon advances, in fields once considered separate provinces, physics, biology, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, are now edging toward one another, like tectonic plates. Their collision threatens to remake the continent of knowledge.

Today, AI systems are proposing mathematical conjectures, predicting protein interactions, designing drugs, and in some cases devising experiments beyond the imagination of their human handlers. “The end of theory” was once a glib New Yorker headline; today, it begins to feel literal. Science is building a machine that can do science. The implications are not only practical (shorter drug pipelines, new materials) but existential. When intelligence ceases to be a uniquely human monopoly, the Enlightenment’s quiet assumption, that reason is our species’ birthright, collapses.