Comment by ndriscoll

I don't know about you, but my job has become a lot more fun ever since it's become a lot more back-and-forth with the robot. It does all the tedious things for me. It gathers data. It creates prototypes. It makes the mechanical code changes that I want. It allows me to talk with it for a design discussion, and then my design simply appears. I ask it for monitoring dashboards and they simply appear. It records what we talked about, which is something that I never do.

Largely I thought that this is what you do once you're established in math (or any field) anyway. You have some ideas, but the details are kind of too tedious for you to work out, so you give it to grad students/postdocs. Senior engineers have some ideas, but the details are tedious to work out, so you give them to junior engineers.

Now, obviously in the meantime, there's the question of how do we train the next generation? Or do we need to train the next generation? And maybe while we work that out the answer becomes more shadowing/apprenticeship instead of farming out easy tasks.