Comment by shevy-java

> They can put it onto robots / automatic labs, so this step is easily solvable. Humans in a modern lab are largely unnecessary. Just look at China.

You can automate the setup and mechanical process. You could increase the physical capacity for parallel tests. You could increase the rate of acquiring raw materials.

But how much you cut down the time depends on how much of the trial-and-error feedback loop depends on feedback and iteration vs cast a wider initial net.

(One of the interesting things to me about the dominant software development agent pattern across all of Claude, Codex, and Cursor is that the approach is still extremely local and iterative, human-mimicking, rather than big-brain-one-shotting a novel or perfectly-fit-for-purpose software design. The performance of the agents on the initial "jump to conclusions" step does not appear superhuman in the same way that the speed-of-iteration is clearly superhuman.)

> Humans in a modern lab are largely unnecessary. Just look at China.

Care to elaborate, explain?

> Humans in a modern lab are largely unnecessary.

That is utterly untrue. It stems from the notion that biology only needs big data for us to solve all its mysteries.

Beyond that, while automated labs for cell biology are plausible and active, and the same fit organoid biology, the same really isn’t true at organism level. Labs already are artificial environments that make organisms have odd phenotypes, and odd interactions which bias the data away from what you’d find in the natural world.

You add in robotic manipulation, and you add a new confound.

Drones in the wild are an obvious counterbalance to this, though even in that scenario, the drone can be a confound unless well hidden.

In the end though, this kind of systemic breakdown of biology, while much needed raw material to improve our theories, won’t solve the whole of biology. Human hands and human minds will be needed for a good long while.