But our present-day scientific world presents a new challenge to sound reasoning about causes and effects. While awareness of the need for a causal model has grown by leaps and bounds among the sciences, many researchers in artificial intelligence would like to skip the hard step of constructing or acquiring a causal model and rely solely on data for all cognitive tasks. The hope—and at present, it is usually a silent one—is that the data themselves will guide us to the right answers whenever causal questions come up.
