>but unless you take the philosophical stance that "if we just made AGI they'd be able to solve every problem we have, so everything is effectively an ML problem", it doesn't seem like it'd be fair to say the bottlenecks to solving either of those are even related to ML in the first place. It's essentially all a matter of bioengineering coming up with the tools required.

We're currently using our brains (a general problem solver) to build bioengineering tools that can cheaply and easily edit the DNA of a living organism. 30 years ago this would have sounded like magic. But there's no magic here. This potential tool has always existed, we just didn't understand it.

It's possible that there are other tools in the table that we simply don't understand yet. Maybe what we've been doing the last 60 years is the bioengineering equivalent of bashing rocks together. Or maybe it's close to optimal. We don't know, and we can't know until we aim an intellectual superpower at it.