> Penrose book...

That's from 2003, when the string theory theorists were riding high and attacking string theory was bad for a physicist's career. Now, "with string theorists now virtually unemployable unless they can figure out how to rebrand as machine learning experts...", the situation has reversed.

String theorists understand high-dimensional math, so maybe they can do something for machine learning theory. Probably not, but we can hope. It's frustrating how much of a black box machine learning systems are.