I used to work in the MPI world on supercomputer jobs and it was miserable. I also worked on other high concurrency systems at Google (helped run the Ads DB, did training and engineering of Sibyl). I continue to insist these systems are incredibly simple compared to even the most basic human cells interactin g.

But I don’t see how any current AI system will have the curiosity and drive. You need to create conditions for meaningful experiments to be done and a mechanistic way of doing this doesn’t work. The most elegant experiments find ways to cut to the core of the emergent behavior, around all the simultaneous changes happening in different levels of the system from which said behavior arises.

You simply cannot see it all. Not every AI can, we are measurement limited. We can track and measure some dynamics, and the art of the experiment lies in thinking through the connections, then picking the right places to look to catch the system in the act. And you better do it so the failure guides the next experiment, and the next and the next, till you finally have sliced through the complexity and found some key nodes that hold the keys.

And usually after all that, you find your key node is regulated by the key nodes of a few other grad students. The complexity here is in part because the entire system is in constant conversation across levels of organization. The causal flow is looped and is also very sensitive to the environment.

AI has a big role to play, but I doubt it’ll parse it without humans at play. It simply cannot invent a slight modification of a microscope and physically connect the new lens element in the right place, calibrate it, all in time for the biology grad student next door to bring some cells to image that are a mix of 40 days old (no contamination! Magic!) vs 30, 20, and so on, to do a very expensive experiment (in terms of labor and time and rats and materials).

So much can go wrong on so many vectors. Which is also what pushes humans to their creative best. And AI will help a lot. But till you have a robot that can drive, but also do mouse dissections and staining and manipulate a microscope with faulty parts to get a clear image, you’re going to need humans to study biology.

When you invent these super robots that somehow slide through all this physical labor without consuming a whole lot of power, we can talk.

Meanwhile, at the cutting edge, where neither procedure nor mass produced machinery exists to do the whole thing, the reality is, we already use a lot of fancy tech in biology, and can use more, and AI can help keep the focus on the actual physical experiments that take so much care and attention.