> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?

Accelerators and colliders have had a profound impact on medical sciences. Nuclear isotopes used for nuclear medicine[1] is often produced by cyclotrons[2], the accelerator component of circular colliders. The detectors[3] used in things like PET scanners are based on detectors used in collision experiments[4]. Using protons to treat cancer was an idea that came directly from work on cyclotrons[5]. Using the tools developed to simulate how the collision fallout interact with the detectors at LHC[6] has been incorporated into radiotherapy to more accurately compute required doses[7][8].

> perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data

We are actually data starved, we have lots of good ideas but no way to test them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_medicine#Sources_of_ra...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_camera

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintigraphy#Process

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History

[6]: https://kt.cern/technologies/geant4

[7]: https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mp.17678

[8]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240542832...