Comment by visarga

This is true, a lot of progress can still happen based on simulation and synthetic data. But I am considering the long term game. In the long term we can't substitute simulation to reality. We can't even predict if a 3-body system will eventually eject an object, or if a piece of code will halt for all possible inputs. Physical systems implementing Turing machines are undecidable. Even fluid flows. The core problem is that recursive processes create an knowledge gap, and we can't cross that gap unless we walk the full recursion, there is no way to predict the outcome from outside. The real world is such an undecidable recursive process. AI can still make progress, but not at exponentially speed decoupled from the real world and not in isolation.