[ijk]

This is, I think, what I've been struggling to get across to people: while some domains have problems that you can test entirely in code, there are a lot more where the bottleneck is too resource-conatrained in the physical world to have an experiment-free researcher have any value.

There's practically negative utility for detecting archeological sites in South America, for example: we already know about far more than we could hope to excavate. The ideas aren't the bottleneck.

There's always been an element of this in AI: RL is amazing if you have some way to get ground truth for your problem, and a giant headache if you don't. And so on. But I seem to have trouble convincing people that sometimes the digital is insufficient.