Self-driving labs for off-road science
What happens if I lick that?
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“Self-driving labs” sound like a great idea. You just need to do the work to create an autonomous setup that can form the hypothesis, do the experiment, measure the data, and iterate while using that data to create a model that can come up with even better hypotheses. AI has gotten pretty good at suggesting what reagents to mix, what DNA to synthesize, or what elements to sinter. Robotics has reached the point where machines can follow those instructions.
But “self-driving labs” are closer to cruise control than a self-driving car. You’ve automated holding speed in a pre-chosen lane on a road someone else already built. Some kinds of science are like highway driving, but a lot is offroading (especially the kind that creates new paradigms). This is no insult to highway driving science! A lot of useful and fascinating knowledge has come from figuring out new recipes within a specific workflow – new medicines, materials, and even the building blocks of the periodic table1.
So much science is driven by steps that rhyme with “huh that’s funny” and “I wonder what happens if I lick that?” Today, these moves are beyond the capabilities of self-driving labs. There’s no reason that will be true forever, but the only way we’ll get there is if we don’t let the mechanization of the textbook scientific method dominate work in “AI for science.”
Optimistically, scientists who are working in fields that look more like off-roading than highway driving can still benefit from the self-driving labs craze. Every lab has some set of things they do over and over again. In the same way that the “smartphone wars” made digital cameras, gps, and wireless incredibly cheap, the self-driving labs craze will hopefully make the ingredients for automating pieces of labwork cheaper and more accessible. Astute scientists will be able to leverage these ingredients for weird science and potentially even use them to unlock new fields.
Henry Lee recently wrote that autonomous labs are better if they’re specialized. For the foreseeable future, they have no choice but to be.
Scientific and technological progress is rarely linear or predictable; practice and theory often trade places.
“Off-roading” mirrors how knowledge first emerges from experience. Newton saw the apple fall before gravity was codified, and Archimedes noticed water spill before buoyancy was formalized (to the extent that these legends are at least partially true).
But once isolated, such phenomena must be theorized to be recombined, extended, and trusted. When we enter unfamiliar terrain, where the roles of forces or interactions are unclear, we often need to reverse gears: theory first, practice later, i.e., “highway driving.”