[robot-wrangler]

I'm cautiously optimistic that the theory camp will benefit as much the applied guys, but later. They dream and scheme and shape fields by making vague intuitions and questions sharper, but they also need interesting patterns to work with as their raw material.

Identifying suitable problems in this sense rather than solutions is an AI use-case you don't hear about much. We don't quite have the infrastructure for this yet but by combining language models / anomaly detection / knowledge-bases we might be in a position to give a Conway 25 interesting high-quality puzzles before breakfast. Funny that it's like a kids nightmare, chatgpt giving them homework instead of solving it, but if it had good taste, people would love it for research.

Anyway, for now, dreamers will probably find more inspiration by cross-pollination with colleagues from different disciplines, or just going for a walk.