Should artificial intelligence be used in science publishing?

Advances in automation technology mean that robots and artificial intelligence programs are capable of performing an ever-greater share of our work, including collecting and analyzing data. For many people, automated colleagues are still just office chatter, not reality, but the technology is already disrupting industries once thought to be just for humans. Case in point: science publishing.
Increasingly, publishers are experimenting with using artificial intelligence in the peer review process for scientific papers. In a recent op-ed for Wired, one editor described how computer programs can handle tasks like suggesting reviewers for a paper, checking an author’s conflicts of interest and sending decision letters.
In 2014 alone, an estimated 2.5 million scientific articles were published in about 28,000 journals (and that’s just in English). Given the glut in the industry, artificial intelligence could be a valuable asset to publishers: The burgeoning technology can already provide tou