I’m a scientist. I have worked in chemical industry R&D for >20 years. People talk about automated wet labs as if they’re the next great AI revolution. But there is a problem. They’re not new. Industry has been automating experiments for decades. Automated analytical chemistry: 1950s. Laboratory robots: 1980s. High-throughput screening: 1990s. Today we automate liquid handling, synthesis, biological testing, plant phenotyping and much more. Pharma and chemical companies have spent decades building the machines, protocols and infrastructure to generate experimental data at scale. So what does AI actually change? Potentially something much more interesting: Which experiment we run next. Generate 1,000 hypotheses. Choose the most informative experiment. Run it. Measure reality. Feed the result back. Choose again. Repeat. That loop could get dramatically faster. And here’s the irony: AI could make decades of investment in wet-lab infrastructure more valuable, not less. Because no matter how intelligent the model becomes, look at what never disappears from the loop: The experiment. AI can accelerate the thinking. Automation can accelerate the testing. But reality still gets the final vote.

I’m a scientist. I need to say this because the AI hype is getting ridiculous. AI can design a molecule in seconds. That doesn’t mean it discovered a drug. It discovered something we scientists have never been short of: Something to test. Someone still has to make it. Run the experiment. Measure whether it works. Check whether it’s toxic. And ultimately prove it works in the real world. AI hype tells us: “Prediction is discovery.” “Simulation is experimentation.” “Generating a molecule is developing a drug.” It isn’t. AI is making ideas incredibly cheap. But every new idea creates something AI cannot generate: Evidence. And the more hypotheses AI produces, the more experiments we’re going to need. That’s the irony nobody seems to be talking about. AI may not make laboratories obsolete. It may make them more valuable than ever. You can speedrun the thinking. You can’t speedrun reality.