The way I see it, if you made a large simulated world where virtual beings evolved and where each generation took a millisecond from birth to death, you would see extremely rapid evolution, but you wouldn't be particularly worried about these beings breaking out of the simulation and taking over the world, because fitness in the virtual world doesn't necessarily translate into fitness in the real world. If you create stuff within a toy world, you get toys.

I think the same is true of "research" and intelligence in general. There is no such thing as a general intelligence or a general capacity to research. It's always fine-tuned to an ambient setting, including ours. Even within humanity, our intelligence is most effective in fields where rules are rigid and quick and decisive feedback is available (math, engineering, computing), but it is much less effective in soft sciences, and disappointingly useless in politics. In other words, the dynamics of innovation and improvement are not purely mental, they are very much tied to external factors that are not always easily controlled.

> it'd also require "physical intuition" to be a harder to generalize skill than research, which also seems like it can't possibly be true - one of these is just physics

It's not "just physics", it's a honed system for surviving a realistic range of physical conditions, assess material properties on touch, adapt manipulation to arbitrary shapes, predict trajectories, take into account variations in ground, smell, wind, and so on; not to mention the machinery of the body itself, which self-repairs and protects us against a range of complex threats.

The point isn't that machines couldn't do all this. The point is rather that you can't quickly iterate and adapt designs to do it from an ivory tower. Pure "research" simply won't get you there, you also need to experiment, and insofar that physics limit the throughput of these experiments, the speed of improvement will be throttled severely. It is a mistake to think that "RSI" could break this, because it is categorically the wrong lever to pull.