"Ah," says the optimist, "but we will clearly invent FTL travel just by throwing enough money and AI-hours into researching it."

(I've seen this 'enough money ought to surmount any barrier' take a few times, usually to reject the idea that we might not find any path to AGI in the near future.)

The claims that AI will itself solve the problems it creates are I think my favorite variation of this. I think it was Eric Schmidt who recently said well sure breakneck AI spending will accelerate climate change but then we'll have AI to solve it. Second cousin to Altman saying it will solve "all of physics," I suppose... and actually he said "fixing the climate" right before that.

Indeed.

The delicious irony is that we know how to solve climate change.

We’re simply not doing enough about it.

That’s not too much of a stretch. The standard model already has solved almost all of physics.

Only a few edge cases remain.

Edge cases like 85% of the mass in the universe, and 95% of the mass-energy.

That’s a misnomer. We know what probably causes the mass energy, it’s the cosmological constant. It only regards 68% of the energy density currently.

Same for dark matter. There are a few hypothesis, but all in all they are pretty simplistic cases.

We know the particles, the forces, there is not really “new physics” to be discovered here.

All the interactions anybody can encounter in their lives is fully understood.