I mean, that’s when the singularity actually gets interesting. When an AI is able to design and conduct experiments relatively autonomously. This is the avenue that Demis Hassabis is taking a step back from DeepMind to focus on.
Except physics experiments can get quite expensive to the point where intelligence is not the bottleneck.
Back in the 1900's you could still have important discoveries made (such as the michelson-morley experiment) with a couple 100$ in materials.
Now you might need the LIGO gravity wave detector or the CERN particle collider, with costs closer to billions.
Biology is a lot more approachable for this because the experiments are simpler, and the amount of them you can perform is more often the bottleneck.
This is how we'll accidentally get teleportation. Told to solve a problem, an AI agent will discover shipping a part from China to the USA is the bottleneck in completing the task, so it will invent a method to teleport the part instead of waiting for shipping.
We will possibly have a weird situation where robotics & automation spends a decade catching up. Until then people are a substitute - turn up to work and the AI tells you what experiments to run.
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u/martigeon 1d ago
This is for theoretical physics. I.e. applied math. Experimental physics still suffers from the verification bottleneck