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My response to that would be tongo back to something like chemistry, which is computationally more complex than chess, less complicated than modeling a lot of other real world things, but also obeys known equations.
There are some surprisingly simple systems for which all our normal computational chemistry approximations fail and they require much more sophisticated solutions. And you can't always handwave it away to "AI will find a simpler approximation that works". How do you know? Is there a good enough approximation that "works" for factoring any large number? Why should computational scaling laws cease to apply in theory? Would, for example AI be able to solve any arbitrary NP hard problem even if we could prove P != NP?
I don't know! I'm just temporarily importing my understanding of the tenets held by the singulatarian doomerists. They seem convinced that there's nothing we can do, not militarily, not intelligence community, not nothing, to even hold a candle in comparison to how good it's going to be at executing. Presumably, a part of its ability to be so good is going to be understanding the world around it with significantly smaller error bars than we currently have. I don't think they even need it to be completely zero error bars; just that it's wayyyy better than ours. What I think is related is that we don't need to have perfectly zero error bars in order to avert war; we just need small enough error bars to overcome the bargaining frictions. Given the high costs of war, that seems pretty feasible.
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