I agree. Robots are the non-biologist's abstraction of how scaling in biology scales. Imagine people in the 1940s pouring money 100x money into automating the vacuum tube factory than inventing the transistor. Imagine putting everything into giant CPU factories instead of inventing the GPU. We are disproportionally thinking/resourcing innovation in biology as if it's car manufacturing. There is ample opportunity to improve, redefine and scale measurement in front of us. I recently talked to someone at a robot-first science factory with near billion in funding boasting how they measure ~1000 mutants a week. A team of 4 at Dyno scaled the equivalent assay multiplexing by 25x. 1 person can run it. The robot is scaling the wrong layer. I'm not against robots and I think they will have the role to play. But I think their impact on biology is overblown, especially on how it scales in performance per dollar deployed. The danger is we become so obsessed with vacuum tube factories that we don't fund the transistors of biology. Complex physical value chains are somewhat path dependent, once you build a highway instead of a subway, you have to deal with a lower efficiency, higher pollution world. Most current robotic approaches are a crude, and poorly scalable, way to scale biology.