Alas, the Mystery
Pulling at the threads of what makes us human
By now you've probably heard of the grand mathematical accomplishments of OpenAI in proving Navier-Stokes (or at least providing a solution). Behind the scenes, drama was inevitable: one-upmanship and slavish disregard for the effort and energy humans put into the problem. By way of explanation, brute force overcame precision, a scalpel exchanged for a sledgehammer. At the core? Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models from OpenAI, and a whole lot of behind-the-scenes bullshit politicking.
Along the way, if you were paying attention, you got the sense that what used to be a sacred art was ripped away from the hallowed halls of academia and placed squarely into the arms of the masses, warts and all. Aside from a token few, did anyone know what Navier-Stokes was about? Further, did anyone really care?
Most took the news as another feather in AI's cap, part of a broader trend toward "solving" humanity's extant problems. Others took umbrage, pointing out that AI did nothing but bash away at prior work, co-opting academic research for the brutalist sheen of capitalism's coin. You'd be right to assume impropriety, based on the data points coming to light.
But a further issue lies somewhat beyond the horizon. If AI can accomplish in days what would typically take humans years to do, what is the point of discovery, trial and error, and the application of our minds to the unproven mysteries of our universe?
I'd like to believe that we exist in a perpetual fog of mystery, surrounded by the immaterial yet visceral reality of the unknown. Humanity has, for millennia (and before written language, millions of years), attempted to explain the unknown. We've created mythologies, the pantheons of gods and goddesses, angels and demons. We've explained natural phenomena through the lens of human experience; anthropomorphised entities that resemble us but are greater than the collective "us." These have been our frail attempts at defining the "what" of our experiences in the absence of the factual "how."
As we've grown in our intellectual understanding of our universe and the seams and cracks of the firmament beneath our feet, we've explained away the gods. We've sequestered mythologies between book covers, relegated cave drawings of impossible feats to museums, created fiction from previous facts, and trundled ever forward into the next unknowns. Another layer of mystery removed.
We've sent satellites around planets and beyond our direct planetary system; we've enabled instantaneous communication in places even angels would fear to tread. We've discovered mutations and mechanisms in the very fabric of our beings that enable health and wholeness in ways the ancients could only dream of. And for each step forward, we shed another layer of mystery.
With the advent of information systems, those silicon collections of bits and bytes, of sand and substrate, we've progressed to almost god-like precognition. We're at the stage where we can anticipate world events with scary accuracy. Our models predict weather events with better accuracy; our economic markets are algorithmically derived; AI drives our interviews and hires. We have cars that use AI to determine traffic operation (sometimes with disastrous results), and applications that use AI to research and write. And, as noted at the very onset of this narrative, AI is being used to "prove" foundational theorems and mathematics that once took us weeks, years, decades to engage with.
When all is said and done, we’re eating away at mystery, one innovation at a time. We’re exchanging mystery for knowledge at a rate never before seen.
I don't offer these words as a moral or ethical judgment on what we're doing as humans. I wonder aloud whether our sense of mystery is being abraded away, ground down by our relentless pursuit of knowing. I wonder if, perhaps, the mysteries of yesteryear that lent themselves to our insatiable curiousity are gone, replaced by the clinical (and cynical) approach of solutioneering through AI.
You could rightly point to the rapid growth of startups and scaleups seeking to solve a myriad of problems, incentivized by frictionless access to capital and computation, as the antidote to my conjectures. You'd be right in assuming that curiousity has led these brave adventurers to create new muscle in the marketplace. As social evolution demands, they either thrive or die, marked and mutated by the ever-changing world around them. But this isn't the entire measure of mystery, is it?
Academics still ponder: is our explanation of phenomena the right one, or are there variations and deviations? They seek the veracity of process, with the outputs being explainability and reason, not Cliff Notes or sound bites. Perhaps that does them a disservice in this day and age, when TikTok is our encyclopedia and Instagram our library. But in the service of truth, their relentlessness does have its merits.
At this point, I offer only this: our pursuit of mystery, of the meaningfulness beyond the moments we find ourselves in, must not stop. It cannot stop simply because a machine jackhammered its way through. It cannot stop because we've somehow made the profound simple. It must not stop because the moment we let ourselves be beguiled by the sloppy simplicity of artificiality, we lose the touchstone of mystery that has guided us since time immemorial.
I'd ask you to pause between the next question you pose to your AI: what mysteries do you find unsolved in your life, and what steps are you taking, with your agency alone, to understand them? Perhaps in this quiet, private audit of your being, you'll realize that there's a bit more mystery to be had. And that this alone is worth it all.
May it ever be so.
