Dawkins’s “Middle World” idea seems relevant here. We live in Middle World, but we investigate phenomena across a wide range of scales in space and time. It would at least be a little surprising to discover that the pace at which we do it is special and hard to improve on.
I agree that research can probably be improved upon quickly and easily. Lab on a chip is obviously a way we are doing that currently. If an AGI system has got the backing of a large company or country and can get new things fabbed in secrecy it can improve on these kinds of things. But I still think it is worth trying to quantify things. We can get ideas about stealth scenarios where the AGI is being developed by non-state/megacorp actors that can’t easily fab new things. We can also get ideas about how useful things like lab on a chip are for speeding up the relevant science. Are we out of low hanging fruit and is it taking us more effort to find novel interesting chemicals/materials?
Dawkins’s “Middle World” idea seems relevant here. We live in Middle World, but we investigate phenomena across a wide range of scales in space and time. It would at least be a little surprising to discover that the pace at which we do it is special and hard to improve on.
I agree that research can probably be improved upon quickly and easily. Lab on a chip is obviously a way we are doing that currently. If an AGI system has got the backing of a large company or country and can get new things fabbed in secrecy it can improve on these kinds of things.
But I still think it is worth trying to quantify things. We can get ideas about stealth scenarios where the AGI is being developed by non-state/megacorp actors that can’t easily fab new things. We can also get ideas about how useful things like lab on a chip are for speeding up the relevant science. Are we out of low hanging fruit and is it taking us more effort to find novel interesting chemicals/materials?