Experiment vs. theory-driven discoveries

I agree that experimentation may precede theory. But the question is whether theory-free experimentation works well. Examine that history in more depth and you’ll find centuries and centuries of pathetic attempts at flight. And then at the turn of the 20th century inventors studied aerodynamics, and then we started to fly well. The progress thereafter was astonishing. We went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in less than 70 years!

AGI is much harder than flying. To return to my question, how do you envision the emergence of conjectural knowledge and creativity? “We experiment first and then discover our abstractions only later”? If so, given the protracted histories of experiment-led discoveries (such as flight), why do you feel we’re close?

Just so we don’t repeat ourselves, I agree completely with you (and Deutsch) that we may be a single breakthrough removed, and it could quite possibly seem simple and obvious in hindsight. However, there’s nothing in that observation, in the context of a massive space of possibilities, to suggest the discovery is imminent. Is there?