The End of Insight
I’ll leave it to you to decide how this drawing relates to this column.
I wish I’d coined the phrase “The End of Insight,” but I didn’t. Mathematician Steven Strogatz did. Here’s the backstory.
My pal Richard Gaylord, a physicist, urges me to watch a podcast in which Strogatz, math professor at Cornell and author of bestselling books about math, talks to physicist Nigel Goldenfeld about correspondences between math and reality.
I love the conversation, because Goldenfeld and Strogatz don’t harp on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, as scientists are wont to do. They point out that mathematical models don’t work so well in fields such as biology and neuroscience; and when models work we often don’t know why they work or how they correspond to reality.
I mention the Strogatz/Goldenfeld conversation in a column, “Math, God and the Problem of Evil.” Then, to my delight, I find myself having a phone conversation with Strogatz about science, math and artificial intelligence.
Strogatz is a paradoxical figure. He writes with exceptional clarity about mathematics, helping non-mathematicians understand integrals, infinite series and other topics. But for decades he has warned that mathematics, especially when aided by machines, is outrunning human comprehension.
In his 2006 essay “The End of Insight,” Strogatz notes that proofs are becoming more complex and reliant on enormous computer calculations. As a result, “Even when we're able to figure out what's true or false, we're less and less able to understand why.”
“If this is happening in mathematics,” Strogatz adds, “the supposed pinnacle of human reasoning, it seems likely to afflict us in science, too--first in physics and later in biology and the social sciences (where we're not even sure what's true, let alone why).”
In a 2011 column “Will Robots Steal Your Job?,” tech journalist Farhad Manjoo cites Strogatz’s “end-of-insight” conjecture. Strogatz elaborates, telling Manjoo that we humans are “reaching our limitations” in fields requiring large calculations.
“People talk about hundreds of billions of things in economics, in the brain, in genes,” Strogatz says. “That’s where the scientific frontier problems are—and we’re just not very good at thinking about those kinds of numbers.”
“I do think we’ll be put out of business” by machines, Strogatz adds. “This is really going to happen.” Remember this is still a decade before ChatGPT has everyone ranting about the rise of the machines.
Strogatz reiterates his prophesy in The NY Times in 2018 in an essay on Google’s machine-learning program AlphaZero, which just crushed the reigning computer-chess champion. “Most unnerving was that AlphaZero seemed to express insight,” Strogatz says. “It played like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style.”
Noting that machine-learning algorithms are surpassing humans at medical diagnosis and other complex tasks, Strogatz speculates that machines may soon tackle “the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome.”
Rather than just giving us answers, Strogatz suggests, intelligent machines could be programmed to explain their reasoning to us, so we can keep up with them, seeing what they see. “For human mathematicians and scientists,” Strogathz says, “this day would mark the dawn of a new era of insight.”
But eventually, Strogatz predicts, machines will pass too far beyond our comprehension for us to keep up. “The dawn of human insight may quickly turn to dusk.” As machines keep churning out discoveries, we’ll be reduced to “spectators, gaping in wonder and confusion” at the machines’ accomplishments.
Maybe we won’t care about our lack of insight, Strogatz says, as long as the machines “cure all our diseases, solve all our scientific problems and make all our other intellectual trains run on time.”
Yeah, maybe, although that scenario reminds me of the animated sci-fi flick Wall-E, in which robots do all the work while fat, lazy, mindless humans lounge on recliners.
Let me add a few points:
I’m not scared of machines taking over, that’s science fiction. I’m scared of powerful corporations and nation-states using AI to become more powerful. Power, not “insight,” is their primary goal. Remember that the U.S. military is a major funder and consumer of AI.
Science has always been more about power than understanding. Quantum mechanics makes no sense, but that hasn’t stopped researchers from making quantum gadgets, including, now, quantum computers--also funded by the Pentagon.
Physics teachers tell students learning quantum mechanics, “Shut up and calculate!” That is, stop worrying about what the theory means and learn how it works, so you can build cool stuff.
As philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, most of what we humans do consists of “competence without comprehension.” We prize our conscious understanding, insights, epiphanies, but how conscious are we, really?
Neuroscientist Christof Koch proposes that we keep up with machines by getting chips implanted in our brains. I’ll leave it to you to imagine the downside of that idea, but just keep in mind that Elon Musk—via his Neuralink firm--is an enthusiastic promoter of and investor in brain chips. And yes, the Pentagon has a long-standing interest in “brain-computer interfaces,” too.
The end of insight is consistent with what I call conservation of ignorance. We emerged from oblivion, and to oblivion we will return.
Let me end on a light note. There’s something contradictory in saying we’re reaching the end of insight, because that is an insight. Right? As physicist/poet Piet Hein writes:
Knowing what
Thou knowest not
Is in a sense
Omniscience.
If you know you’re in the cave, that’s sort of like escaping it.
Further Reading:
I fretted that math and science are outrunning our cognitive limits in my 1993 article “The Death of Proof” and 1996 book The End of Science. My free online book My Quantum Experiment also dwells on that theme, as do these columns:
Should Machines Replace Mathematicians?
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
On God, Quantum Mechanics and My Agnostic Schtick
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room and the Limits of Understanding
The Ironic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics