What happened to alchemy is the Chemical revolution, which followed the earlier scientific revolution. The discovery of composition of air, oxidation and conservation of mass is what made chemistry a science.
If you compare it with the current state of Alignment research, there are several nebulous concepts that have no firm grounding in either theory or experiment, and it is quite likely that some essential concepts are not even formulated. To speculate wildly, maybe there is something like “scaling of intelligence” or “conservation of interpretability” or something else that can be put on a firm mathematical/CS footing.
What happened to alchemy is the Chemical revolution, which followed the earlier scientific revolution. The discovery of composition of air, oxidation and conservation of mass is what made chemistry a science.
If you compare it with the current state of Alignment research, there are several nebulous concepts that have no firm grounding in either theory or experiment, and it is quite likely that some essential concepts are not even formulated. To speculate wildly, maybe there is something like “scaling of intelligence” or “conservation of interpretability” or something else that can be put on a firm mathematical/CS footing.