Scientific superintelligence won't look like a smarter chatbot
bravo_abad · x · 2026-10-02
Prompted by the White House tech-leaders meeting and an executive order telling federal agencies to adopt the term "Super Intelligence", the author asks what scientific superintelligence would actually look like — and argues we're looking in the wrong place. Science advances through decisions under uncertainty: what to investigate, which results to trust, what would change our minds, where to spend a month of instrument time. A meaningful threshold would be a system that repeatedly turns those decisions into reliable new knowledge better than leading human research teams under comparable constraints. The decisive capability may be choosing the next experiment, learning from failure and repeating at scale — "the intelligence is in the loop" — not a chatbot producing dazzling answers.
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