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Redditing-Dutchman t1_j5yyhbp wrote

'Meat Space' as some call it (the real physical world) is quite slow. Purely digital stuff has the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy and quick to roll out. ChatGPT gets invented and we all have acces to it a year later.

Now with physical stuff like rockets you need to build actual factories. And factories need workers, land and permits. And permits are often political. The starship launch sites from SpaceX is waiting for years now to get approval because of endless red tape.

Thus, AI might give you plans for a rocket in 2025, but before it's actually build its 2035. This is something you have to keep in mind with making predictions.

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calculuschild t1_j63s962 wrote

While the actual manufacture is indeed limited by the real world, we shouldn't gloss over the fact that simulations (and AI/machine learning has already demonstrated that in some cases it can simulate complex scenarios faster than traditional slow, Finite-element algorithms) and digital design (CAD, aided by genetic algorithms, etc) can help us speed through a lot of the steps that traditionally could only be done in 'meat space'.

Right now a lot of that digital process is still hanging on a lot of the same things you already mentioned (slow humans, politics, beurocracy, need to test prototypes, etc), but I think at some point, a lot of that will go away too due to automation in those sectors. Not to mention AI can probably start chipping away at factory/manufacture lead times with better planning and logistics than humans could ever come up with.

TL;DR if the AI gives you the plans and it still takes 10 years to build, we can't forget about the 25 years it saved already by transferring a bunch of meat space tasks into a digital equivalent.

But yes, your point is very important to keep in mind. Meat space is agonizingly slow compared to the digital world.

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