Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than answers

The article's perspective reminds me of math class when I was a kid. The teacher didn't want the right answer alone, she wanted to see how I got there. In an absolute sense, the right answer is the right answer with or without my understanding, but that's not how the class was graded. We're approaching a point where AI is to science as my old calculator is to elementary school math -- it's capable of leapfrogging to answers faster and more accurately than we can.

Thing is, though, verification is knowledge itself. And if we can get to a point where the important questions have answers, we can surely have the verifiers explain those to us in ways we can understand them.

We all know Terry Tao, do you know Peter Scholz?

Fields medalist and as Tao listed as one of the most important mathematicians of our age.

Scholz is known to find „precisely the correct and cleanest way to incorporate all the previously done work and find an elegant formulation for that — and then, because he found really the correct framework, go way beyond the known results“

In a way that man is the complement of an AI, he generates understanding rather than just proofs.

Maybe he is the right template for the mathematicians of the future.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/peter-scholze-and-the-future-...

Surely the way forwards is to take the results obtained by brute force with AI, for example that certain conjectures are true or false, then to use that knowledge to further human understanding.

Knowing that something is true or false will at least stop humans wasting time trying to prove or disprove it, and allow them to find a more elegant proof, or investigate the implications of the true/false result.

"Is science about humans achieving insight, or the archiving of verifiable solutions?"

I wonder if this dichotomy fully captures the value of scientific discoveries. One could argue that their practical impact can be independent of whether humans fully understand how they were reached.

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I would rephrase it as: "Verification is not human knowledge", but that doesn't really matter. We are going to be several steps behind AI as it reaches a level of intelligence far beyond human capabilities, and we are not going to be able to catch up with it. It's like trying to beat AI at chess: we are bound to be left behind as AI continues to expand its knowledge in mathematics, physics, computer science, and other fields. Eventually, no human being will be able to reach that level of knowledge within their lifetime.