IRB, API, and a PI: When Agents Run the Lab
Virtuous Machines: Towards Artificial General Science reports something deceptively simple: an agentic AI designed three psychology studies, recruited and ran 288 human participants online, built the analysis code, and generated full manuscripts—end‑to‑end. Average system runtime per study: ~17 hours (compute time, excluding data collection). The paper frames this as a step toward “artificial general science.” The more immediate story for business leaders: a new production function for knowledge work—one that shifts the bottleneck from human hours to orchestration quality, governance, and data rights. ...