I'm kind of surprised by how little support Halo is getting. Why do you want to stop at building AIs and Robots when you could learn the secrets of super dense materials, make weaponized ring-worlds or unravel the secrets of neural physics and ascend humanity to god-hood?
Well, Chaos Emeralds are clearly a source of potent energy, since it enables the Super forms- which technically anyone can do. Then there's Sonic himself, a relatively ordinary hedgehog who can nonetheless move at speeds that should destroy him.
Just studying Chaos Emeralds & Sonic would revolutionize society, with infinite clean energy and problem-free highspeed travel. Imagine, a world would you could travel between the US and Japan in mere minutes.
Thus, since everyone would have significantly more time and resources can be transported insanely fast, it'll eventually lead to a scientific revolution. Given this is a world that can already make Biolizards and mechanical gods with Earth science alone...
That's without factoring in Chaos, Shadow, and Chaos- all of whom present even opportunity to remake the world and society! Then there's other goodies, like the storybook worlds of Secret Rings and Black Knight.
Like, literal other worlds accessible by books. In fact, this is a world filled with supernatural stuff, and then there's Air Ride with their legit hover tech and gravity manipulation.
Seriously, focus on the time & resource saving options would increase technological and scientific progress nicely. Mean, Eggman built an intergalatic theme park that didn't take decades to reach somehow! Just imagine what he could of done with infinite energy and
more speed!
Heck, there's a time manipulating monster thing out there, just
waiting for us to partially cyborgize so we can mess with time however we want! We could set up controlled environments in the past, to conduct experiments that would take millions of years to bare results!