For example: the simple administrative task I carried out this week of entering data in an excel sheet – something I will have to repeat numerous times – didn’t go fast enough to my mind. When I complained about it, my supervisor tried to put matters into perspective with a metaphor: in some ways, we resemble a laboratory. Sometimes you just need to sit down and focus on the hour-long task at hand, just like a biologist needs a week to create a cell culture for the next experiment.

That metaphor immediately broke down in my mind of course, because we do everything on the computer. Not only do we have the glorious undo key, we can also computerize anything we want – including filling out an excel sheet – using a computer code. Some of my colleagues seem to be of like mind: our Github (for the layman: a kind of database of codes) contains several dozens of ‘utils’ (toolboxes), meant to computerize the most trivial tasks.

The unpleasant downside to this computerization is that I always have the feeling at the end of a working day that I could have done more. I could have sent that email to a colleague or finished reading that article, if only I had given more of my tasks to the computer. It’s a persistent feeling of insecurity.

I know that things aren’t that simple. The stack of input waiting for you the next morning will only grow with each task that you outsource to a computer, resulting in more work. A vicious circle of profound irony. In addition, keeping an eye on the computer takes much mental energy. Because we know from experience that much can still go wrong during the calculation process. And you can’t run all processes simultaneously either – after all, the computer code needs to be written first.

No toolbox in the world can fully computerize that most important task of all: thinking. Computerization is useless if you can’t make an informed decision on how to put it to use. I wait – half excited, half filled with a sense of doom – for the day when artificial intelligence changes this. That would render us scientists instantly superfluous, but at least I could catch up on my reading.