AI in Science Credit: oecd.org
Introduction
Ongoing progress in understanding our environment motivates some researchers to claim that science will eventually explain absolutely everything. Science has been very successful investigating how the natural world around us works. It has explained how the planetary system was created with the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago or how life began on Earth 3.8 billion years ago. The utility of science is knowledge of natural physical mechanisms and the generation of technology. In his book The Grand Design (2010), the physicist Stephen Hawking states “Philosophy is dead, philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science”. As a result, science has no connection to values, meaning and purpose and it might never get there.
Limits of Science
Scientific understanding is sometimes envisaged as a hierarchy, ordered like the floors of a building. Mathematics is in the basement, followed by physics and chemistry while biology and the behavioural and social sciences reside on the top of the hierarchy. Aligning the sciences is uncontroversial but it is questionable whether the ‘ground-floor’ sciences – physics in particular – are more important or more all-embracing than the others. According to the physicist Steven Weinberg, the majority of scientists are reductionists. They feel confident that everything can be reduced to Schrödinger’s differential equation that forms the basis of quantum mechanics. However, new concepts are required to understand complex issues such as the migration of birds or the functioning of the human brain. Efforts to understand complex systems – especially our brain – might well be the first barrier demonstrating the limits of science. Moreover, physicists might never understand the combined nature of space and time because the mathematics are too hard to comprehend. In contrast, the claim that there are limits to science has been challenged by David Deutsch, a distinguished theoretical physicist who pioneered the concept of ‘quantum computing’. In his provocative book, The Beginning of Infinity (2011), he says that any process is computable. However, being able to compute something is not the same as having a knowledgeable comprehension of it. By reaching the limits of what our brains can grasp and to understand physical reality we might gain insights of which we are not yet aware. Possibly AI might support us to overcome this barrier once it exceeds human-level intelligence.
Limits of AI
In an article published by ZDNET, contributing writer Tiernan Ray makes the point that some scholars of AI warn that the present technologies may never provide ‘true’ or ‘human intelligence’. Today AI has more capabilities than at any time since the term was first introduced by computer scientist John McCarthy sixty-six years ago. As one result, the application of AI is shifting its focus from intelligence to achievement. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook (now Meta), spoke at length with ZDNET about a paper he published about where AI needs to go. LeCun expressed concern that the dominant research of deep learning will not achieve what he refers to as ‘true’ intelligence. This includes applications such as the ability for a computer system to plan a course of action using common sense. LeCun believes that without true intelligence, such programs will ultimately provide little or value. At a talk in 2019 at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Alphabet’s Deep-Mind research unit (today Nobel laureate) made the remark that – like an idiot savant – many AI programs could only do one thing well. Deep-Mind, said Hassabis, is trying to develop a richer capability. “We are trying to find a meta-solution to solve broader problems,” he said. Already in the late nineteen forties, Alan Turing anticipated this change in attitude. He predicted that ways of referring to computers and intelligence would shift in favour of accepting computer behaviour as intelligent. “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. “As the sincere question of intelligence fades, the empty rhetoric of intelligence is allowed to float freely in society to serve other agendas”, wrote Turing.
The Theory of Everything
The theory of everything proposes a computational framework, combining quantum mechanics and classical physics into a unified approach to explain the laws of the universe. Both classical and quantum mechanics describe the world around us, one describing the motion of large bodies while the other describes the motion of small, tiny particles that make up large bodies. Yet finding a unified description compatible with both branches of physics has been one of the greatest challenges for scientists, encompassing well known and proven laws of physics such as:
The second law of thermodynamics which states that the amount of entropy of a system will always increase. Entropy is also a measure of disorder as the universe is moving towards a more disordered state. However, anything that has entropy must also have a temperature, implicating that it should radiate energy. Quantum mechanics states that what seems to us like an empty space is actually not empty. It is alive with dynamic activity of simultaneous creation and destruction of energy on the subatomic scale. Particles and antiparticles are created in pairs, where one particle has positive energy and the other has negative energy. One particle is matter and the other is thought of as anti-matter. At some point they rapidly collapse back together in a process known as annihilation. Stephen Hawking suggested that particles created very close to a timed event do not need to be annihilated together. So far no other theory has emerged that describes the fundamental laws of our universe in a better way.
Has Evolution Reached A Peak?
Despite huge advances in science over the past century, our understanding of nature is still far from complete. Not only have scientists failed to uncover the holy grail of physics – unifying the very large (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics) – they still do not know what the vast majority of the universe is made up of. The theory of everything fails to provide an answer. Moreover, there are other outstanding puzzles, such as how consciousness arises from matter. Will science ever be able to provide all the answers? Human brains are the product of evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction and not to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realisation has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing that there are bound to be things we will never understand. Some argue that scientific development might already have reached its limit and may be doomed based on what American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky calls ‘mysteries’. If one thinks that humans alone have unlimited cognitive powers – setting us apart from all other animals – one may not have fully digested Darwin’s insight that Homo sapiens is part of the natural world. In a similar way, we use physical objects (such as paper and pencil) to vastly increase the memory capacity of our naked brains. Mathematics is another fantastic mind-extension technology, which enables us to represent concepts that we could not think of with our bare brains. For instance, no scientist could hope to form a mental representation of all the complex interlocking processes that make up our climate system. Based on this limitation this is the reason why we have constructed mathematical models and intelligent machines to do the mental work for us. Most importantly, we can extend and communicate our own minds to other human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of producing cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation. Hence, there is no indication that human evolution has reached a peak.
Conclusion
One can conclude that the discussion about the limitation of science as well as the limitation of AI is merging towards issues regarding evolution. So far we do not know how the human brain gives rise to consciousness and meaning. Only time will tell if such a merger will break-up big tech’s financial hold on a rapidly growing market or humanity will enter a new era of presence on this planet.