I'd say that balancing those aspects are exactly what an AI excels at. And an AI can iterate in a way a human wont. Completely redesign something because an edge-case could be slightly better.

AI isn't brute-forcing, or it would have been completely unusable for code.

> Will future cheap compute power be able to overcome this? I'm not betting on it.

Famous last words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

Also did you not see the quoted post at the end, they are already training ai on running material science labs so we are quickly moving away from the non-expert.

We can probably find people saying the search space for Go is too large and that we'll never be able to do protein folding and if we can we'll never manage protein interactions and then well never manage to simulate a whole cell (tbc). I just think at some point these machines become smarter than us, if it's 2 years or 20 years the self improvement part will happen on both the hardware and software side. Judgement day is inevitable.