Robo Scientist...

While reading some articles on Yahoo! today I came across one that really caught my attention. This article was one that talked about robots actually starting to take the place of scientist. Researchers are now able to create a robot that can reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own. Now this is very scary to me. I understand that a robot can be helpful in getting into small areas and being very precise and accurate but I do not know if I would trust it running on its own to open me up. The article explains that for right now they are performing "humble" tasks but soon scientists hope that these beings will be able to unravel complex biological systems, designing new drugs, and model the world's climate or understanding the cosmos. One of the creators of this machine from Cornell makes that statement that these machines will not make scientist obsolete any day soon but believes that one day they will be able to perform the research development needs of scientists. I wonder though is science all about researching and developing things on your own so that you are familiar with what it is you are doing? What is the need for machines to figure everything out for us just so that we can in turn pretty much repeat what it is they are doing? Does that then make us a living machine following the same repetitive pattern in our own lives almost becoming a slave to these machines? I think we can see this today in our own world with the internet. No longer are the days of researching in the library under stacks of books searching for answers, we can just hope on our hand dandy computer. But really what do you get out of the research if you are really not experiencing it for yourself and just repeating what is being shown or told to you. All I know is, it seems like machines are more and more over powering our daily lives and I am scared to see what happens when we are all just sitting around one day kicking ourselves for bringing about our own downfall with careers and daily tasks. We must realize our limits and make sure we are maintaining control over the situation, because right now it seems we are just trying to constantly out do each others and in return I see many of us becoming lazier and lazier.