Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are poised to revolutionize intellectual
work, with generative AI enabling automation of text analysis, text generation,
and simple decision making or reasoning. The impact to science is only just
beginning, but the opportunity is significant since scientific research relies
fundamentally on extended chains of cognitive work. Here, we review the state
of the art in agentic AI systems, and discuss how these methods could be
extended to have even greater impact on science. We propose the development of
an exocortex, a synthetic extension of a person's cognition. A science
exocortex could be designed as a swarm of AI agents, with each agent
individually streamlining specific researcher tasks, and whose
inter-communication leads to emergent behavior that greatly extend the
researcher's cognition and volition.

人工智能方法将革新知识工作，生成式人工智能实现了文本分析、文本生成和简单的决策或推理的自动化。我们回顾了代理人工智能系统的现状，并讨论了如何进一步将这些方法扩展到科学研究中。我们提出开发外在皮层的构想，即人工合成的人类认知扩展。科学外在皮层可以设计为一群人工智能代理，每个代理单独优化特定的研究任务，并通过相互通信实现出现行为，大大扩展研究人员的认知和意愿。