Inside the 'self-driving' lab revolution
nature.com
nature.com
So much advanced equipment is just sitting there in labs, waiting for humans to finally go and make experiments. Which they eventually get round to, sort of, when they can secure funding and when the grad student isn't ill or making mistakes or framing the problem the wrong way.
AI-driven labs can iterate 'good enough' hypotheses way faster than human R&D systems. Automated labs are going to be a major source of discovery.
That's not really what the article is about though. Short of staffing it with humanoid robots, existing labs and their equipment will continue to be unused.
> King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.
The throughput here is astounding, especially when driven by researchers who really know how to chart a path. I feel every time a critical feedback loop is made both faster and cheaper, it makes everyone participating better. I wonder whether we will see many more "whiz kid" scientific researchers than we have today.
Is there evidence of that?
The expensive equipment is usually a small (but crucial!) part of research activity, which involves things like talking to a lot of people, getting permission to do weird or new things, going out into the environment and collecting things in very specific ways, storing and transporting them carefully, observing, etc. Building or modifying existing lab instruments, doing various things with animals that are not co-operative ... and CLEANING. Who does all the cleaning?
Definitely use cases when you have a specific protocol you want to scale, but I'm also not sure how safe I would feel around AI with a license to experiment and access to dangerous reagents, high temperatures, etc. Or, god help us, an oligonucleotide synthesizer. Which is definitely going to happen (if it has not already).
In some cases that would be the same person that does the most advanced innovative and/or creative work.
The idea behind the fully automated system is that fewer hired hands are needed for efforts that are routine enough. But not zero, you still need one person who can do everything at a minimum, if called upon for mission-critical operation.
In the case of the creative work and planning where it is out of the league for AI, these things need to always be done too, but they are not exactly "routine".
Once most of the tedious routine tasks are well-automated though, then the human brain behind the lab can finally relax a bit, with eurekas flowing at the same rate without needing a full 40 or 50 addititonal hours at the bench any more, while even more results are generated than they could do single-handedly too.
Which gives them the time to do the cleaning also, otherwise they would need two humans to serve their only automated system.
And there is a distinct decline in open ended, personal exploration in academics. There are many reasons for this, but the syndrome is widespread throughout the West and throughout scientific disciplines. The first response to someone interested in recreating a published result or simply asking "What if?" is always "Who will pay for that?" Or more discretely, "Will it lead to a grant." Regardless if the cost is $100 in reagents and 8 hours of bench time in an idle lab, or $200 to machine a new reaction chamber the focus from administration is not enabling exploration but standing in line with your hand out.