Elaborating on The Very General Helper Strategy: the first thing you do when planning a route by hand is find some reasonably up-to-date maps.
One thing that almost always tends to robustly generalize is improving the tools that people use to gather information and make measurements. And this also tends to snowball in unexpected ways—would anyone have guessed beforehand that the most important invention in the history of medicine would turn out to be a better magnifying glass? (And tools can include mathematical techniques, too—being able to run statistical analysis on a computer lets you find a lot of patterns you wouldn’t be able to find if it was 1920 and you had to do it all by hand.)
With regards to AI, that might mean interpretability research?
Elaborating on The Very General Helper Strategy: the first thing you do when planning a route by hand is find some reasonably up-to-date maps.
One thing that almost always tends to robustly generalize is improving the tools that people use to gather information and make measurements. And this also tends to snowball in unexpected ways—would anyone have guessed beforehand that the most important invention in the history of medicine would turn out to be a better magnifying glass? (And tools can include mathematical techniques, too—being able to run statistical analysis on a computer lets you find a lot of patterns you wouldn’t be able to find if it was 1920 and you had to do it all by hand.)
With regards to AI, that might mean interpretability research?