“We're going to start dealing with oracles that are infallible but opaque. They'll tell us the truth, but we won't know why.”
Radiolab · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Strogatz, a mathematician, asking what happens if machines get so far ahead in mathematics that people can no longer learn from what they produce. The host had just suggested that all we would get back is yes or no. For Strogatz that is the unsettling part, because he comes from a culture where a problem isn't solved until it is understood.
Transcript
…a certain direction. The key question, and what is so disturbing to think about, unsettling, is: let's imagine a time where the machines are so good at math that we can't learn from them because they're too advanced. They're so far beyond us that we can't understand what they're doing anymore. And
then, like, eventually all you'll get is sort of yes, no, yes, no.
Right, exactly. We're going to start dealing with oracles that are infallible but opaque. They'll tell us the truth, but we won't know why.
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back.
May I talk about Regina Barzili now?
I'm always going to say yes. Steve makes the argument that this is not just an issue in math. And we talk about whether AI starts solving our problems or answering our questions. Does it even matter if we understand how?
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