“The data to build all this new knowledge doesn’t exist.”
The data is probably out there somewhere—but it has not been tied together in a coherent and usable “frame”. That “frame” is what knowledge is.
That is exactly what AI should be able to do.
I keep reminding folks that the average human IQ is 100—so AI can make a lot of blunders and still do better than humans.
My daughter did a recent PhD on a tripartite plant-fungal-bacterial symbiosis. To hear the stories about gathering meaningful lab data considering the errors was sobering. Considering the differences I see between "wild type" alleles and those modified for analysis and then whether those behaviors translate to actual behavior in soil...
The answer is no.