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Robotic Science

Robot scientist outperforms humans in lab

From the article:

"An intelligent robot that could free genomics researchers from routine lab chores has proven as effective as a human scientist. The robot not only performs genetics experiments, it also decides which ones to do, interprets the results and comes up with new hypotheses."

Also:

The team compared the performance of the Robot Scientist with that of a graduate student doing the same experiments. Not only were the results just as accurate, but the system did not need to perform as many experiments because its hypothesis generator found solutions more quickly, so its costs were about two-thirds lower.

The conventional wisdom holds that robots won't be doing "human" things like "generating hypotheses" and "interpretting results" for decades, yet we are seeing the harbingers of it today. From the NY Times:

"It's like if you have a machine which is broken, the system can automatically reason to find all the possible ways it can be broken," said Ross King of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. "Some philosophers have thought this is impossible for computers because that's the imaginative leap."

And:

"It is now possible to design artificial intelligence systems that are able to reason well enough to be effective partners in scientific research," Dr. [Larry] Hunter [University of Colorado School of Medicine] said.

Despite the conventional wisdom, it really will not be that long before robotic intelligence is equivalent to, and then surpasses, human intelligence. See Robotic Nation for details.