Comment by uv-depression

> With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent

I see no evidence of this, just a lot of people claiming it (very loudly, for the most part).

> that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon

The word probably is doing a lot of work here.

> The usual constraints of physical law still apply

There are knowledge constraints, too. I can't build a quark matter processor without understanding quark matter to a vastly higher level than we do now. I can't do that without experiments on quark matter, I can't do experiments without access to a lot of energy, material, land, &c, that need to be assembled. There are a huge number of very difficult and time-consuming instrumental goals on the path to fundamentally better compute.

> A separate point: there's also deductive exploration (pure math) as distinct from empirical exploration (physics), which is not bounded by any physical constraints except for those that bound computation itself.

Sure, but physics requires math that is definitionally applied, not pure, and engineering requires physics.