Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, 17th May 2026

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According to the shiny-suited ‘thought leaders’ currently infesting LinkedIn, artificial intelligence is now a fully-fledged scientist, and laboratories can drive themselves. But before we hand over the agonising, beautiful poetry of human discovery to a predictive text engine, perhaps we should ask why we’re letting middle-management buzzword merchants sell us the tickets to our own obsolescence.

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Right! Listen! I was looking at LinkedIn the other day. Why do we do it? Why do we subject ourselves to LinkedIn? It’s a website designed specifically to make you feel like you’ve died, but instead of burning in a majestic, fiery hell, you’re trapped in an eternal, beige purgatory of middle-management synergy meetings. It’s a digital holding pen where sociopaths with MBA degrees and aggressively white teeth congratulate each other on waking up at 4 AM to drink lukewarm lemon water, take an ice bath, and “crush their Q3 paradigms.”

And bubbling up through this sewage pipe of toxic positivity, I see an article by a bloke called Barnaby Bullshine. Barnaby Bullshine. “Futurist.” He calls himself a futurist. What does that even mean? It’s not a real job, is it? “Futurist.” It just means you’ve bought a very expensive black polo neck and you own a dog-eared copy of Wired magazine from 2018. He’s a “Thought Leader.” He leads thoughts. Like a shepherd leading sheep to the abattoir, except the sheep are mid-level marketing executives and the abattoir is a two-day corporate retreat at the NEC Birmingham with weak coffee and a breakout session on ‘Disruptive Empathy’.

Barnaby looks at the vast, beautiful, terrifying, bloody expanse of human scientific endeavour—centuries of plague, brilliance, starvation, and discovery—and he thinks, “How can I boil this down into a bullet-pointed listicle for recruitment consultants in Slough?”

So Barnaby has written a piece. A “think piece”, if you will. And he’s called it “AI is Becoming a Scientist: How Self-Driving Labs Accelerate Discovery.”

AI… is becoming… a scientist.

Let’s just sit with that. Let the sheer, vacuous weight of it wash over you. AI is becoming a scientist. And it’s doing it in “self-driving labs.” Self-driving labs! Now, I consider myself a reasonable person. I try to understand the modern world. But when I read the phrase “self-driving labs,” I try to picture what Barnaby actually thinks is happening. Is the biochemistry department of Aston University going to do a three-point turn? Is the Medical Research Council going to reverse into a disabled parking space at the Milton Keynes ASDA at 3 AM to buy a Rustlers burger and a multipack of Monster Munch? No! No, it isn’t! It’s a robotic arm, isn’t it? It’s a robotic arm knocking over a beaker. It’s a motorised pipette bolted to a glorified spreadsheet!

But Barnaby… Barnaby says the AI is becoming a scientist.

And the thing is… the thing is… it just isn’t. Is it? It just isn’t. Because what Barnaby, with his gleaming AirPods and his premium subscription to the Harvard Business Review, doesn’t understand is that an algorithm hasn’t got the fundamental, soul-crushing despair required to be a real scientist.

You see, a real scientist isn’t just a machine that processes data. Did Isaac Newton have a self-driving lab? No! He had an apple, a terrible personality, and a rampant case of mercury poisoning! Did Marie Curie sit around waiting for a large language model to ‘optimize her workflow’? No, she carried lumps of glowing radium around in her pockets until her bones literally turned to dust, because she had passion, you corporate leeches!

An AI hasn’t spent seven years living on cold baked beans in a damp, black-mould-infested flat in Leeds, crying into a Pot Noodle over a failed PhD thesis on fruit fly genetics because the grant money from the European Union got pulled by a minister who thinks “science” is something you do with a chemistry set you got for Christmas in 1954. An AI doesn’t know the sheer, unadulterated misery of sitting in a freezing portable building in February, trying to get a Bunsen burner to light while the head of department breathes down your neck asking where the publishable papers are. An AI doesn’t have a nervous breakdown at a symposium in Dusseldorf because someone from the University of East Anglia pointed out a flaw in their methodology! An AI doesn’t drink three pints of flat bitter in the student union and weep openly about the half-life of carbon-14!

BUT BARNABY WANTS TO TELL YOU IT’S A SCIENTIST!

Because it sounds good! It sounds shiny! It appeals to people who think a scientist is a stock-photo model in a pristine white coat, holding up a glowing blue test tube and pointing thoughtfully at a transparent iPad while standing in front of a whiteboard covered in meaningless algebra!

IT’S GRIFT! IT’S PURE, UNADULTERATED, TWENTY-FOUR-CARAT, SNAKE-OIL GRIFTING BULLSHIT!

He’s just typing buzzwords into a document to keep the Microsoft algorithm fed. AI. Synergies. Self-driving. Accelerate. Paradigm. Pivot. He’s like a toddler! He’s like an overgrown, corduroy-wearing toddler pressing buttons on a brightly coloured plastic Fisher-Price toy telephone! “Ring ring! Hello? Is that the Future?” Except the toy telephone is the global economy, and the toddler is charging fifty grand a pop for a forty-minute keynote speech to a room full of regional sales managers in Dubai!

And then you look beneath the article. You look at the comments section. Oh, the comments section. A wretched hive of scum and sycophancy. The LinkedIn sycophants clicking the little ‘Celebrate’ icon. The little clapping hands. The little lightbulb.

There’s a bloke there, let’s call him Gavin Gobshite. Gavin Gobshite, “Senior Director of Synergistic Outcomes.” Gavin writes: “Great insights, Barnaby! We are truly entering a paradigm shift!”

No you’re not, Gavin! You’re entering data into a payroll system! You don’t know what a paradigm shift is! You thought a paradigm shift was when they moved the water cooler closer to the stationery cupboard! You wouldn’t know a paradigm shift if it drove up in a self-driving lab and ran over your foot!

And then there’s Brenda Bootlicker. “Chief Vibe Officer” at a startup that sells artisanal dog food on a blockchain. Brenda chips in: “This resonates so much, Barnaby! AI is democratizing the scientific method!”

Democratizing! They love that word. What does she think the AI is going to do? Run for local council on a platform of better funding for petri dishes? It’s a text prediction model, Brenda! It’s a glorified autocorrect that’s read the whole internet and regurgitated the most mathematically probable sequence of corporate jargon! It isn’t discovering penicillin, it’s just hallucinating a recipe for a pipe bomb based on scraped Reddit comments!

AND IT MAKES ME WANT TO RIP OFF MY OWN HEAD AND KICK IT DOWN THE CROMWELL ROAD! BECAUSE THESE BASTARDS! THESE SHINY-SUITED, TED-TALKING, PODCAST-HOSTING FUTURIST BASTARDS! THEY ARE SELLING US THE OBSOLESCENCE OF HUMANITY AS A B2B NETWORKING OPPORTUNITY!

Do you see what they’re doing? They are taking the most profound, difficult, beautiful struggles of the human intellect—the quest to understand the very fabric of the universe, the desperate search for cures to terrible diseases, the absolute essence of why we are a sentient species—and they are repackaging it as a “productivity hack.”

“Oh look, the machines are taking over the scientific method! That means we can fire the entire Research and Development department, replace them with a premium OpenAI subscription, and increase shareholder dividends by 0.4%! Don’t forget to like and subscribe and endorse me for ‘Disruptive Innovation’!”

And that’s… that’s the tragedy of it, really. That’s the joke. And it’s not even a funny joke. It’s a long, slow, agonizing joke told by a venture capitalist while he’s standing on your windpipe.

We have outsourced the sheer, agonizing poetry of human discovery to a predictive text engine, and we’re being sold the tickets to our own funeral by a bloke on LinkedIn who thinks ‘Quantum’ is just a brand of dishwasher tablet. We are applauding our own replacement because someone put the word ‘accelerate’ next to it. We are standing on the edge of the abyss, and Barnaby Bullshine is charging us a monthly subscription fee to look down.

I’m going to go and sit in a dark room until the algorithm forgets me. Or until a self-driving lab crashes through the living room wall and offers me a job as a Bunsen burner. Goodnight.