It's almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time", and "Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science."

In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called "The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age."

The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we've picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that "we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."

As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we're forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace:

Source: Bloom et al. (2020)

It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI.

It's far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: