This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

Steve Jobs once described personal computing as a “bicycle for the mind.”

His idea that computers can be used as “intelligence amplifiers” that offer an important boost for human creativity is now being given an immediate test in the face of the coronavirus.

In March, a group of artificial intelligence research groups and the National Library of Medicine announced that they had organized the world’s scientific research papers about the virus so the documents, more than 44,000 articles, could be explored in new ways using a machine-learning program designed to help scientists see patterns and find relationships to aid research.

“This is a chance for artificial intelligence,” said Oren Etzioni, the chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit research laboratory that was founded in 2014 by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder.