Comment by timr

> There's nothing that AI won't be able to mine and accomplish (aside from being literally human), it's only a matter of hardware and scale at this point.

Sure there is: problems that require knowledge that simply doesn't exist yet. Until "AI" turns into general purpose robots that can develop new tools to explore the world, it is, in fact, pretty damned limited in what it can do without human help. The world is vast. Math is small.

Biology is replete with examples. Computers "solve" protein folding [1], and midwits immediately leap to conclusions that drug development will also quickly fall. But we literally have no idea how most of biology works, and simply getting to the starting line for drug development problems is often 95% of the battle. Come talk to me when you've done a million experiments to find the fundamental knowledge that unlocks the pathway(s) we didn't know about that makes a drug discovery program possible in the first place [2].

I am not pessimistic about humans running out of challenges. We'll just declare one class of problems "done" [3], and move on to the next frontier, as we always have. The problem with AI doomers is that they lack imagination that extends beyond computers, or perhaps more accurately, are so sophomoric in their thinking that they skip over the hard parts of any problem they don't fully understand. This stuff reminds me of the endless smartypants whinging about the end of human intelligence when chess machines started beating grandmasters. Chess was never really that great a measurement of human intellectual capacity, and we found new things to do with our big monkey brains.

[1] They did not solve protein folding, except in the minds of people who don't fully understand the problem.

[2] ...and invented new machinery to make the experiments possible in the first place.

[3] ...and we'll likely be wrong about that.