Ant Rowstron on What happens when you let an AI run a science lab

Antony “Ant” Rowstron, who has worked with ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) on their £6M call to automate scientific discovery, shares how AI scientists are now running experiments in real labs with little human intervention. He points to concrete results already coming out of these self-driving labs, from AI-designed personalized cancer vaccines to to molecules that stimulate our own immune response to new viruses in 48 hours.

We get into what it actually takes to automate the scientific method, why AI hallucinations might be useful for discovery rather than just a flaw to fix, how science labs will look in the future, and how the role of human scientists will change as AI in science progresses.