Will robots make you redundant?

I’ve had a principle for some time that every working scientist should have an ‘elevator pitch’ ready to describe their jobs. That’s an old phrase from Hollywood, when someone gets a chance to pitch a movie idea in the time of an elevator ride with some big studio executive. For a scientist, the elevator pitch is a compressed description of what they’re doing, or what they do in general. It’s a particularly relevant idea for people in industry, where the question ‘What is it you do around here, anyway?’ can be asked at any time – in that case, not only should you have an answer ready, but it would do you good to make sure that the same answer would occur to other people anyway. Ideally, it should involve something that you’re doing that is unique to your abilities, something that would make you hard to replace.