Comment by tensor
5 hours ago
Note that the vast majority of science requires physical experiments. We are very very far from automating that overall. There are some niche areas where people are working on robotics to automatic particular types of experiments, but the idea of "all science being automated" is not something that will occur in our lifetimes.
Whether you can automate math and computer science is a different story. It's possible, but I don't believe we are remotely as close as 2028. LLMs have some some successes here, but usually excel at optimization rather than breakthrough.
There's a lot that would have to go right to get to "all science", but isn't robotics itself a field pretty amenable to automation? A server rack might have trouble building new hardware, but it seems not terribly hard to imagine an LLM-based model deploying new experimental algorithms to the hardware and extracting their performance from a camera feed.
With humanoid robots, a large chunk of what would otherwise be highly expensive to automate becomes possible. "ALL" science may not be automatable. But lots will be.
Absurd. The scientific apparatus is already automated. What are you going to do, have your humanoid robot do the pipetting when there is already a specialized machine that fills trays of 100 samples every 5 seconds? (Totally made up example.)
There might be a way to phrase the future as a tradeoff of capital expenditures; at least that argument would be worth reading about.
Most science is not automated like this in practice. You only see robotic pipetting and fluid handling when you're looking at something more like production or development or you have a truly ridiculous amount of variations to try that are otherwise extremely uniform.