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Short abstract:

Complex organizations like laboratories play a huge role in transformation theories as tools for human coordination that allowed modernity to take hold. But what happens when labs become autonomous and the problem of coordination disappears? The paper analyzes developments in lab-autonomization.

Long abstract:

The complex organization plays a huge role in transformation theories that explain the transition from a premodern to the modern age, it is in a sense the tool for the coordination of human groups that allowed industrialization and modernity to take hold. Max Weber pointed to hierarchy and expert knowledge as two mechanisms that explain the effectiveness of complex organization. Laboratories, both big and small, are organizational units, but neither hierarchy nor human individual intelligence best characterize Labs, as STS has shown—hierarchy is often played down, non-existent or not possible, intelligence appears distributed, and object relations—rather than personal relations—dominate in human labs. This paper takes this assessment as a starting point for investigating a further transformation, that from human to human-free laboratories in advanced autonomization efforts in which the problem of human coordination empties out and is replaced by the goal of creating the self-driving artificially intelligent agentic setting for science.

This paper explores current autonomization efforts with a focus on disciplines in which such efforts are most advanced, such as chemistry and biology labs.