From Ross King's Robot Scientist web site (1):

The Robot Scientist is perhaps the first physical implementation of the task of Scientific Discovery in a microbiology laboratory. It represents the merging of increasingly automated and remotely controllable laboratory equipment and knowledge discovery techniques from Artificial Intelligence.

Automation of laboratory equipment (the "Robot" of Robot Scientist) has revolutionised laboratory practice by removing the "drudgery" of constructing many wet lab experiments by hand, allowing an increase in both the scope and scale of potential experiments. Most lab robots only require a simple description of the various chemical/ biological entities to be used in the experiments, along with their required volumes and where these entities are stored. Automation has also given rise to significantly increased productivity and a concomitant increase in the production of results and data requiring interpretation, giving rise to an "interpretation bottleneck" where the process of understanding the results is lagging behind the production of results.

The research fields of Computational Scientific Discovery and Bioinformatics have emerged in part as a response to this bottleneck. Both disciplines use computational approaches from Statistics and Machine Learning to provide an "automated understanding" of the experimental results.

This is a strong signal foreshadowing the near automation of the entire scientific process. This robot is able to function within the framework of molecular biology. However, each field has its own set of opportunities and challenges. The difficulty in extending this concept to other fields, such as organic (2) or inorganic chemistry will depend upon the conceptual models used. Providing the system with fewer human-based rules about how chemistry works would make it more difficult but ultimately could be more interesting.

Coupled with the practice of Open Data (3) and Crowdsourcing (4), a new form of distributed scientific intelligence could emerge that would "understand" reality in the sense that it is predictive and able to control phenomena but not in a way that is necessarily intuitive to humans.

This may be a pathway to the technological singularity.(5)