• Question: Do you think robots are more reliable and accurate than scientist, therefore do you think you could be replaced?

    Asked by to Claire, Ian, Sergey, Vicky, Zena on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Our profession is a very creative one. We have to think of new ways of doing our job every day.
      No robot I know can think creatively. Skynet has not yet been invented.

    • Photo: Zena Hira

      Zena Hira answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      They say that robots can be as smart as the person who created them, so no. You will still need someone smart enough to make one. It is however the case that robots and machines are a lot faster in calculations than humans

    • Photo: Claire Shooter

      Claire Shooter answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I’m in the process of transferring a lot of my work over to a robot. Robots are very good at doing the exact same thing over and over again in a precise and replicable way. The robot is far better at this than I am – it’s never forgotten which test tube it was about to pipette things into because it was too busy thinking about Game of Thrones. I’m pretty happy to give this part of my work to a machine because it’s boring and quite stressful! It will be a while before I can automate the analysis I do, and fortunately that is the bit I enjoy.

      So, with guidance from me the robot can do the hard bits. I’m still necessary because I need to teach it what to do and how, and make sure it doesn’t mess up and break everything (which it nearly did last week). This leaves me to do the fun bits, and once I can automate those I can go and do the same thing for another disease! I think until robots can work out what we need robots for and build those robots themselves, I’ll still have work to do.

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Have you heard of the “Singularity” ?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

      It’s a point in time where artificial intelligence supersedes that of humans.

      As a Neuroscientist I don’t think we know anywhere near enough about the structure, function or methods used by the neural circuits in the brain to be able to build robots that can meet let alone exceed that. There are, however, quite a few scientists who believe that this point is close and that the computational power is very nearly here to be able to do it.

      So robots can certainly be more reliable and accurate than scientists at certain tasks and can also of course be perfectly objective (unlike us humans). However, for complex, creative and innovative tasks I haven’t seen anything that comes even vaguely close and cannot imagine that’s going to happen very soon.

      On another note, irrespective of robots, I can always be replaced ! 😯

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