Adam Kucharski

With the emergence of AI, it's almost a bit of the kind of the loss of scientific satisfaction.

I think, you know, you kind of grow up with learning about how the world works and why this is doing what it's doing.

And I talked, for example, of some of the people involved with AlphaFold and some of the subsequent work in installing those predictions about structures.

And they'd almost kind of made peace with it, which I found kind of interesting because I think they started off being a bit uncomfortable.

You've got these remarkable AI models making these predictions, but we don't understand still biologically what's happening here.

But I think they'd just settled and say, well, biology is really complex on some of these problems.

And if we can have a tool that can give us this extremely valuable information, maybe that's okay.

And it was just interesting that they'd really kind of gone through that process

kind of process, which I think a lot of people are still grappling with and that almost that discomfort of using AI and what's going to convince you that that's a useful, reliable prediction, whether it's something like predicting protein folding or getting in a self-driving car.

What's the evidence you need to kind of convince you that's reliable?

And this, this was a fascinating story because this, Kirk Goodell, who's like one of the greatest logical minds of the 20th century and did a lot of work, particularly in the early 20th century around system of rules, particularly things like mathematics and, and whether they can ever, uh,

be really fully satisfying so particularly in mathematics he showed that there were this problem that is very hard to have a set of rules for something like arithmetic that was both complete and covered every situation but also had no contradictions and I think a lot of countries if you go back things like Napoleonic code and these attempts to almost write down every possible legal situation that could be imaginable

always just descended into either they needed amendments or they had contradictions.

I think Godel's work really sums it up.

And there's a story that's in the kind of late 40s when he had his citizenship interview and Einstein and

Oscar Morgenson went along as witnesses for him.

And it's always told as kind of a lighthearted story as, you know, this logical mind, this academic, just saying something silly in front of the judge.

And actually, to my own admission, I've in the past given talks and mentioned it in this slightly kind of lighthearted way.

But for the book, I got talking to a few people who had taken it more seriously.

I realized he has this extremely logically focused mind at the time.