Meta-Ken

From the NYTimes site: British scientists say they have developed a robotic system that for the first time can design a genetics experiment, carry it out and interpret the results. No difference was found between the laboratory bench results generated by the robot scientist and those gathered by graduate students doing similar work, the researchers report today in the journal Nature. While the system remains in its infancy, they hope it will someday conduct laboratory-intensive work, freeing researchers from drudgery.

Could this mean laboratory science is on the verge of making a huge leap in terms of time it takes to conduct experiements? Will robotic scientists cook up schemes that humans never thought to try - or were too scared to try? Maybe it just means it's about to be harder to get a job as a lab tech.