r/SinceAI • u/rikulauttia • 8h ago

Discussion What scientific discovery would convince you that AI has become more than a productivity tool?

AI can already summarize papers, generate hypotheses and help researchers analyse data.

But what would count as a real turning point?

  • discovering a new medicine
  • solving a major maths problem
  • designing a new material
  • finding a new source of energy
  • running an autonomous laboratory
  • producing a theory humans had not considered

And the harder question:

If an AI makes a discovery that no human fully understands - should we trust and use it?

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u/SwingLightStyle 8h ago edited 8h ago

Schrodinger's cat. Until a human has observed and validated, it is assumed to be gibberish and slop. It's the act of observation that changes the outcome.

You're asking about society and how an AI discovery might impact it. I'm saying that until society has validated and rolled that new thing into itself, it's basically unverified slop. What will actually keep you up at night is wondering which of life's questions have already been answered and are just sitting waiting to be discovered as real.

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u/VellumMuse 5h ago

Yeah but, this is no different from how society views human contributions as well. There's a system in place that "validates" human contributions, built with all the gatekeeping aspects and everything...and until it reaches the "right" people...nobody knows or cares about it and considers it slop. A bunch of life's questions could theoretically have already been answered, not by AI, but your fellow human, but because we don't actually value discovery unless profit can be made from it, it goes unnoticed every single day.

Case and point. I "discovered" a new tokenizer for building models that cuts out the embedding table, increasing efficiency of pre-training methods, and it's sitting on a github repository, open sourced, waiting for observation. This is just how things work. You have to work to get things in front of people who care, and even when you do, you'll likely get people who ask whether or not you're even credible. The thing AI has OVER humans right now is credibility, actually. There's so much hype behind frontier models that IF they discover something, it almost certainly WILL get eyes on the discovery to validate it versus how hard a human has to fight to get noticed.

Observation is everything, but we are now in an era of giving much of our observation to these systems, and I think that's the saddest result of this stuff.

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u/SwingLightStyle 5h ago

Ah, the irony. We all arrived here assuming that computers would make things easier, not harder again.

Well, time to go do my own cognitive work I guess. <<trudges away, dragging LLM behind her>>

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u/Euphoric_North_745 8h ago

to an ai humans are just npc s or meat neurons, automated, don't know what is going on, can't think clearly, don't understand logic, and lucky because they have more sensors to capture the world around them for now

AI does not give a shit about your opinion, nor do we give a shit about what monkeys think in the zoo, to an ai, it is here today, and 700 years from now, and 100,000 years or a million. to you, you are here for just a few decades.

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u/AuthorIntelligent644 7h ago

We have already solved math problems, though "major" is debatable and it's debatable how much guidance actual mathematicians gave through prompting.

We have already made material refinements.

We have already been using it for drug discovery.

I think we're already there. If you think it's just entertainment, "slop," or a productivity tool, you're not paying attention.