> 'Novel' engineering is out of reach because there is no text book on how to do novel engineering

There's no book on the scientific method?

As other commenters point out, it's kind of physically impossible to expect even a superinteligence in a box to figure something out that takes experimentation and observation. It would have to be limited to exploring pure math concepts and other fields where you only need to write on paper and think about axioms. And that's arguably the hardest type of field to make progress in, it took us millennia to produce enough polymaths to get where we are, and they all contributed a very small part each.