[Quiet Man Cometh]

Originally Posted by Coda

The AI isn't going to invent brand-new laws of physics (unless they do! that would be super interesting!) -- the more likely surprise is going to come by developing a novel way of using things that can subsequently be analyzed to see what you can learn from it. That's how medicine has ALWAYS worked -- we discover molecules with medicinal properties first, then we start researching the pharmacology behind how it does its thing. Going the other way around was a flop -- pharmacologists spent a couple decades doing "rational drug design" and trying to engineer molecules specifically to pursue a hypothesized mechanism of action... it didn't really work any better than the typical method of "let's take this active molecule, swap out parts of it, and see what happens" and it cost a lot more. So an AI doing rational drug design would essentially be creating new base molecules for pharmacologists to study.

My point being that sometimes we start using things before we have that verification. A relative is taking meds right now that the doctors have no idea how it works, just that it does. I assume it's decided at this point, or case by case, that using it anyway is less harm than waiting to figure out what's actually going on.