That particular story was made somewhat more plausible because the chips were already based on a newly-discovered, ill-understood physical principle that contradicted normal quantum mechanics. It’s pretty likely humanity would have made the same discoveries, the AI just made them faster.
As far as “missing physics” goes, I still feel that it’s a tad hubristic to assert that we’ve got everything nailed down just because we can measure electron mass very precisely. There could always be unknown unknowns, phenomena which we haven’t seen before because we haven’t observed the conditions under which they would arise. There could simply be regularities in our observations which we don’t detect, like how both Newton’s laws and relativity are obvious-in-hindsight but required genius intellects to be first observed.
Prime Intellect, right?
That particular story was made somewhat more plausible because the chips were already based on a newly-discovered, ill-understood physical principle that contradicted normal quantum mechanics. It’s pretty likely humanity would have made the same discoveries, the AI just made them faster.
That’s the one.
As far as “missing physics” goes, I still feel that it’s a tad hubristic to assert that we’ve got everything nailed down just because we can measure electron mass very precisely. There could always be unknown unknowns, phenomena which we haven’t seen before because we haven’t observed the conditions under which they would arise. There could simply be regularities in our observations which we don’t detect, like how both Newton’s laws and relativity are obvious-in-hindsight but required genius intellects to be first observed.