Depends what you mean by AI... yea if you ask Siri for a cure and she succeeds then you're the instrument, but if I make clever use of the statistics and math behind it all, and find a way to apply it to some drug discovery or procedure, then I'm the hero, and the AI was just a tool.
If you hop into an excavator, you can't really compare yourself with great builders of the past, but you can move ground around much faster than they ever could. This is what I had in mind - not building oracles for scientific discovery (though that would be cool, too), but building excavators for the mind, and airplanes for the mind (and building a Bagger 288 for scientific papers).
sure, but if AI would do 80% of the job then we can't really compare it to another Newton.