FOR those of us that believe that people are the future of humanity, robots and machines present a challenge — and an ambivalent prospect. The industrial revolution, in which machines were introduced on a huge scale, changed the relationship of the working and capitalist classes, as well as the relationship between workers and their labour.

The invention of machines has in some ways improved the quality of human lives. However, the net benefit seems impossible to calculate: machines are used, in practice, not to improve lives, but to increase capital. Today billions live half-controlled by machines.

In our last column, we discussed the consequences of automation applied to personal communication in the form of chat bots. Robots of all forms are also big news in the practice of science.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are current key buzzwords drawing funding across the scientific disciplines. Many scientists hope that using automation — both virtual and physical — will give their fields a boost and open up new avenues of research.

Many funders seem to think that the addition of automation into statistical analysis has the effect of reducing human impact on the scientific process. The common-sense notion is that algorithms are the opposite of human interference. Rather than biased and subjective human feelings, algorithms soar through data on the wings of objectivity, making their findings “more scientific.”

This belief is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science, which is a process of human culture, fully enmeshed with human judgement and decision-making at every stage. Algorithms and machines are often the mechanisation of human foibles and subjectivity.

Physical robots are an interesting case. In many fields, a boom in simple DIY robotics has allowed researchers to speed up experiments that would previously simply require many hundreds more hours of time from junior researchers, often PhD students, lab assistants and postdoctoral research staff.

Lab groups are often founded on a single technique or approach, founded by the research leader (the “principal investigator” or PI) in their previous research.

Many of these advances currently are being made by researchers skilled at programming lab robots — for example, to pipette thousands of times in quick succession.

This can automate laborious approaches to quickly gather a much greater volume of data, opening up possibilities that were previously too labour-intensive.

As in other areas of work, the use of robots to automate experimental lab work does not necessarily lead to a better balance between work and relaxation, or an improvement in the quality of research.

Although it’s tempting for the PI to imagine that robots reduce the burden on research workers in their lab, this is not generally the case. Junior researchers are simply expected to tackle bigger and more time-consuming tasks, as well as to monitor and repair the machines.

The machines do not necessarily liberate them from monotonous work. Some create a new scale of one particular type of monotonous work (for example, the one element of the system that is not automated).

There are other excesses of exploitation built into the current system. PhD students, who form the majority of the workforce for experimental scientific research, spend three to four years doing hands-on research. They are only students in the sense that they learn “on the job” — their work is what forms the content of the vast majority of scientific papers.

PhD students are generally paid a stipend which functions as a salary. UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) currently pays an annual stipend of £15,609. Although students are exempt from council tax, this puts them on a low income with respect to both average salaried and average hourly-waged workers. The average age that PhD students begin their research is 24-25, which generally continues for 3-4 years. Many finish the research they do for their doctorate with a period of unpaid work in order to complete their studies.

This weekend, an open letter to UKRI from thousands of postgraduate research students and their supporters demanded that the increase in the PhD stipend for next year be brought in line with inflation — this year it will only increase by 2.3 per cent. The letter also highlights support needed for students managing the additional stresses of parenthood and migration.

Because of their student status, junior researchers are ineligible for state support for childcare. Many are also migrants, and have to pay huge sums into the NHS surcharge, have no recourse to public funds, or are ineligible to work additional hours in order to top up their PhD stipend.

There is a huge reservoir of casual work available in many universities, some of which is made available to PhD students, but in most, if not all, universities, the norm for payment of these is “in arrears,” meaning that the money is not transferred until up to two months after the completion of the work. Universities are, in general, strongly dependent on this large reservoir of high turnover casual workforce, paid in arrears.

The problem of low quality employment is not just the experience of the student-workers that work this way. It sets the scene for all the other research and teaching work in universities, as it is the first work environment that all university workers experience.

The Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) represents PhD students as well as official staff, and in order to boost their numbers within the organisation offers free membership to the estimated 30,000 graduate students in Britain.

However, the ambiguous relationship between the union and research work itself means that the representation of students engaged in research work remains difficult. UCU industrial action tends to focus on disrupting the teaching activities of universities, which is understandable due to the importance of this income in marketised higher education.

However, if research is real work, and given its use in the production of the future of technology, health and policy, this seems possible, the people who do the research should be allowed to claim the rights, conditions and respect as workers.

The work of PhD students is sometimes dismissed as drudgery, often repeating the same small tasks, monitoring and measuring carefully and repetitively.

These people are trained by senior staff to carry out the heavy lifting that scientists don’t want to do themselves. Introducing robots doesn’t in itself change the way these researchers are treated. Their work is the vital work of science. This is work that should be paid fairly, and the workers treated well.