Afaik it is pretty well established that you cannot really learn anything new without actually testing your new belief in practice, i.e., experiments. I mean how else would this work? Evidence does not grow on trees, it has to be created (i.e., data has to be carefully generated, selected and interpreted to become useful evidence).
While it might be true that this experimenting can sometimes be done using existing data, the point is that if you want to learn something new about the universe like โwhat is dark matter and can it be used for something?โ existing data is unlikely to be enough to test any idea you come up with.
Even if you take data from published academic papers and synthesize some new theories from that, it is still not always (or even likely) the case that the theory you come up with can be tested with already existing data because any theory has unique requirements towards what counts as evidence against it. I mean thats the whole point why we continue to do experiments rather than just metanalyze the sh*t out of all the papers out there.
Of course, advanced AI could trick us into doing certain experiments or looking at ChatGPT plugins, we may just give it access to anything on the internet wholesale in due time so all of this may just be a short bump in the road. If we are lucky, we might avoid a FOOM style takeover though as long as advanced AI remains dependent on us to carry out its experiments for it simply because of the time those experiments will take. So even if it could bootstrap to nanotech quickly due to good understanding of physics based on our formulas and existing data, the first manufacturing machine /โ factory would still need to be built somehow and that may take some time.
Afaik it is pretty well established that you cannot really learn anything new without actually testing your new belief in practice, i.e., experiments. I mean how else would this work? Evidence does not grow on trees, it has to be created (i.e., data has to be carefully generated, selected and interpreted to become useful evidence).
While it might be true that this experimenting can sometimes be done using existing data, the point is that if you want to learn something new about the universe like โwhat is dark matter and can it be used for something?โ existing data is unlikely to be enough to test any idea you come up with.
Even if you take data from published academic papers and synthesize some new theories from that, it is still not always (or even likely) the case that the theory you come up with can be tested with already existing data because any theory has unique requirements towards what counts as evidence against it. I mean thats the whole point why we continue to do experiments rather than just metanalyze the sh*t out of all the papers out there.
Of course, advanced AI could trick us into doing certain experiments or looking at ChatGPT plugins, we may just give it access to anything on the internet wholesale in due time so all of this may just be a short bump in the road. If we are lucky, we might avoid a FOOM style takeover though as long as advanced AI remains dependent on us to carry out its experiments for it simply because of the time those experiments will take. So even if it could bootstrap to nanotech quickly due to good understanding of physics based on our formulas and existing data, the first manufacturing machine /โ factory would still need to be built somehow and that may take some time.