The headline is sexy, but I think it gets the main point wrong. The first sentence in the article that, I think, is the proper lead is: As artificial intelligence continues to evolve however, we are beginning to see the introduction of robotics in many “high-skill” fields such as research and medicine.

The point isn't that a robot was able to make a discovery that human researchers could not. The point is that biologists who do this kind of research will be able to work at a higher level of abstraction: something that used to require manual work on their part can now be automated. We don't replace the biology researchers, rather we've improved their tools.

I haven't read the paper, yet, but it seems as though the article really inflates the claims for the robot's cognitive achievement. There were a set of candidate genes to test as the cause of each enzyme. This was a matter of creating a set of deletion mutants and checking whether the mutants produced the enzymes, a laborious task which would be pretty easy to automate without artificial intelligence. It does seem to be a helpful automation, though.

I think the key point is this: "Dr. King and colleagues gave Adam a database containing information on the enzymes, the chemicals and reagents to do the experiments, and access to the yeast cultures."

I imagine it would have taken a really, really smart robot about 300 years to figure that stuff out on its own. And only IF it had a reason to figure it out.

Not AI ... just another Expert System. Doing exactly what it's told to, efficiently.

Kudos to the team that properly defined the problem and employed the use of an expert system to solve it.

Not yet sentient as the title delicately alludes however. Were a Nobel Prize awarded it would still go to the team not the device.

Where are we on the Kurzweil timeline btw.

Neat. Once you have a very clear problem statement, you can write a program that can perform experiments and analyze the results. It's a step.

Very impressive, but as others have said: without AI at the helm, this is mostly a complex robot taking the place of a human technician. ( Which costs more? )

I suspect that much of the macro-scale manipulation performed by this robot (and humans) will be made obsolete in coming years by microfluidic analytic instruments.

While the robot is definitely impressive, without substantial AI in it, I dont think it qualifies to be called a 'scientist' just yet. It clearly cannot appreciate what its doing -- it might just as well have been cleaning the dishes.

"And though some may be hesitant to accept the ever-increasing roles of robots in our world, I, for one, " welcome our new robot overlords.

(Sorry, but I couldn't resist that perfect segue.)

BTW The paper was published a year ago, so this is hardly news. And the previous significant article was in Nature in 2004.

Am I the only one who was more excited to see the link to Tron Legacy?