Max Marmer

I recently followed a link to this article on Wired profiling the first scientific discovery made by a machine with no human intervention.

This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything that can be automated will be. Automation squeezes all jobs out of the marketplace except the ones that require creativity. On the flip side, these automated tools also enhance human creativity for those who choose to embrace it.

If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.

“There may be teams of humans and machines,” says King. “Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It’s crazy.

The run of the mill engineering student who can solve known problems is no longer safe. It is a necessity both for the innovative progress of the world and the scientist’s ability to find work that he be able to break new ground, not just incrementally improve on existing innovations.

At a panel at Singularity University I attended in early August, Scott Hassan of Willow Garage, who worked closely with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, told the story of how they built the first prototype of Google. He recounted how they coded every evening for about 6 weeks. Only 6 weeks. And now they have thousands of engineers just working on improving that small piece of code they churned out in 6 weeks. “What we have found is that it’s very easy to find someone who can improve something just a little bit, but it’s very rare to find someone who can create even just a prototype of something completely new.”

Recommended Reading: Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Richard Florida’s The Rise of The Creative Class (which admittedly I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list. But I have heard Florida’s thesis expressed many times.)