Robot Culture Machine Efficiently Grows Biological Cells Without Human Intervention

I'll save everyone the trouble of saying, "this is the Matrix, dude. This is skynet...."

In actual fact, it sounds like this should be a boon to humanity. Of course it will put certain lab technicians and graduate students out of work and work study jobs. However, a day is coming when work will be redefined anyway. For most of human history people did not have "jobs" in the modern sense. It's really only since the industrial revolution that the "job". Of course people had crafts and trades even in the middle ages, but that was more rare. The point is that we will have to rethink the nature of work as robots become more capable and more ubiquitous. BTW, someone always points out that "there will be jobs repairing and building new robots", but things like that never provide nearly as many jobs as it eliminates. It's just a likely fact that there will be less jobs and more people to fight over them in the future. If you want to succeed you will have to play a different game.

@aarontco

You make a good point. What, may I ask, would be the different game that would be played out?

I get tired of hearing the same job creation ideas of building roads and bridges...those jobs are only temporary, when the job is done their out of work. What kind of jobs can be created that long lasting and actually pay a living wage?

I'm in college right now, and I feel like I'm going to have to get multiple degrees/certificates/diplomas etc. to even be taken seriously in the work force. We've been fed that a college degree will get you everything, but that just doesn't seem to be true now.

So, I'm really asking this to everyone out there what kind of jobs and what kind of "ballgame" are we going to have to play?

First, I approve of this robotic libratory as having a purple color hue. Though, I do not thing the robots will not have the same joy of it, as myself.

Second, I am for all medical science and I look forward to this further development!

Now what worries me is if there is any spillage or spread of bacteria’s robots could care less of this and so contamination could result. Even though it is run by robotics, it will need constant QA by a human. We humans have a vested interest in health, but robots feel nothing as always. So now the robot becomes the technician and we the humans become the janitors. I will if this an omen of other future things to come.

Correction to last sentence please. I wonder if this an omen of future thing to come of life with robotics and humans.

jlight,
It used to be the case that a college degree was your ticket to the good life. However, that social contract has largely been broken by businesses who don't want to pay for it anymore, and globalization which can find the same level of education at a lower price in India or China. Also many colleges themselves dropped the ball by not teaching relevant enough information and insisting that students should learn "for the sake of knowledge itself", rather than for more practical purposes.

The industries of the future are largely built on the ability to organize information, find patterns, and simplify. I think that many more people will have to be entrepreneurs in the future. They will have to be generalists with flexible abilities and experience innovating. They need to come out of school having already built and researched products or having assembled portfolios of promising business ideas and proposals.

Right now most kids in high school and college think that they can go through the motions and just "fake it" and still be employable with any real competency. Those days are fading fast and it will be traumatic for many. I think the current recession may only be the beginning of a generally more competitive work environment.

@Jlight27

Mr. Aarontco made some very good points. I would say the most important one is being practical.

I was originally trained as a machinist. Then I worked in different fields before getting interest in science. At the moment I am writing up my PhD dissertation. I have seen both the technical and academic education styles and the academic style that exists in the universities is not the way it is once you get to the job world.

I would say that the best way to have job security is to be able to solve the problems that will either produce a process, material or gadget that will either save money, increase efficiency or allow expanded capabilities. I am not talking about a lab tech job either where you more or less just repeat a process of preparing samples or taking measurments. As you can see, the robot in this article is doing that.

There are an endless number of problems that industry is trying to master. If you can come up with the answer, it is worth money. But in college I have not seen that really stressed on the bachelors or even the masters level. The way you are judged in the university is by your GPA…which is more or less your ability to pass tests and how good your short term memory is. Good test scores say nothing about ones ability to find connections between different experimental results; compare them to established theory and then propose and test an idea as to the working mechanism behind the effect that is being studied.

Also,how you represent yourself plays a role. You could be the smartest fellow in your class but if you can not communicate your knowledge to others in a way that they can understand it…and I stress…so that THEY can understand it, you are going to be disadvantaged. If you go to a conference and start discussing a material problem that is in your field with a researcher from GE or McDonald Douglass and you start giving him new insights that will possibly bring his project forward, he will not care if you graduated from MIT with a 4.0 average or from some unknown college with a 2.5.

To sum it up, stay on the cutting edge of problem solving in your field; have a good reputation among others working in your field and represent yourself and communicate well.

As a 5th-year PhD student who is tired of pipetting and growing cells, I can assure you it's not going to put grad students and lab techs out of business. I'd love to have that in my lab. It'd just free us up to have more time to do the actual experiments. And besides, complex machines like that usually require a lot of babysitting -- even they do the physical labor, they need people to run them, fix them, and generating that much sample creates a lot of new work.

the matrix genesis.

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The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.

- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri