Note: this is a highly opinionated piece presenting several deep beliefs of mine that may or may not come across as logically sound. I hope, though, that this will provide something to at least genuinely wonder about.

I firmly believe that if there is an alien species out there that is much faster at thinking than we are, and is much more intelligent than we are, and is equipped with machinery many times more powerful than ours, they have still not been able to figure everything out there in the universe. This belief comes from my more fundamental belief that the universe is many times more mysterious than we can possibly imagine and presents an endless (and I truly mean to say endless) list of questions to ask. In other words, I believe that there are always going to be problems out there that are many times more complex than we can imagine and require machinery that are many times more powerful than what we have - at any point in time for any species. To be very clear about this last point, my belief is that for any being out there, regardless of their level of intelligence and regardless of what time step they are in, they will always have questions that they can wonder about that they have not yet solved, and cannot solve effortlessly. In some sense, this is a belief that I cannot prove through logic. In another sense, for anyone that has been seriously involved in any scientific field that attempts to understand something, I think this could come across as a very logical statement.

What I have said so far is another way of saying the following: if we have artificial superintelligence (ASI), we will not have immediately discovered everything and solved every problem out there because of the unlimited complexity of the universe. So, even if we run ASI every day non-stop, there will always be problems out there that are bigger, more complex, and more interesting the system has not solved yet at any point in time and cannot do so effortlessly.

Orthogonal to this argument (belief) about the endless complexity of our universe, there is also the other reason why ASI will not immediately give us all the answers: ASI, as a system, will still be capped by several features - from the algorithms we discover to run on them to the energy we can harness to run ASI with. Even for a system that is self-improving using some learning algorithm that allows continual improvement, there will be scaling laws that cap its performance. Not only do we have a universe with unlimited complexity that we want to unpack, we have ASI that, despite all its strengths, will still have some limitation (despite being, potentially, far higher than ours).

But now we come to, arguably, the more important question: given ASI will always have problems that it has not solved yet and is trying to chase down, is that journey that ASI will be on a journey that human beings can participate in, or is it just a solitary ride for ASI? If humans have a role to play here, what do we think that role will be?

I want to address this question from a point of view of a skeptic - one that thinks human beings will be lagging behind in terms of "intelligence". Here, by intelligence, I mean something that is somewhat correlated with the number of impressive scientific results one can present over a given period of time.

My answer to this question rests on the following belief: our scientific quest is significantly more about understanding than finding/proving new results. Consider the following two scenarios:

- Suppose a supernatural being/oracle told us today that the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) is true but does not provide us with the proof that explains why it is true. In this scenario, would we be satisfied? Some of us will be - for example, those mathematicians/physicists/scientists that are pondering some question that they can solve fairly easily given RH is true. However, the much broader scientific community would certainly not be satisfied. This is primarily because what we want is not a verdict on whether or not RH is true. We want to know what makes it true if it is indeed true and what makes it false otherwise. That proof itself would help us understand the Riemann zeta function and its many connections with other branches of mathematics/science, and that is really what scientists are wondering about.

- Now suppose our supernatural being/oracle decided to be kinder. They provide us with a full proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. As you might imagine, given the complexity of the problem, the proof is lengthy and rests on several new constructions and even completely new branches of mathematics that we could not fathom. The proof, however, is written quite clearly to the point that we can verify it (perhaps using LEAN or whatever). What do you think we human beings would do in that scenario? Well, first of all, we would read and make sure that we understand that every line follows logically, i.e. we would read the proof and make sure we understand that the proof is logically sound. But what happens afterwards? I think it is almost certain that we would immediately have a gazillion questions about each new construction that our oracle came up with to prove RH, and have a trillion more hypotheses about how they connect with one another and more. In other words, we would truly attempt to understand it — here, understanding is not just merely verifying that the proof is logical, rather it is understanding the soul of the mathematics presented to us. And this is precisely what happened when, for example, Andrew Wiles presented us with the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. It opened up many more questions and conjectures regarding the various objects he studied, like elliptic curves, and several mathematicians, like Richard Taylor, became famous for answering those questions.

In other words, if we had an oracle that could always give us the answer to every big question we have, we would not call science solved — science is about us understanding and that is still up to us. Whatever level of intelligence we are at, even if we are like turtles in comparison to ASI when it comes to the speed at which we can think intelligently, we will always have a crucial role to play in (a) understanding what ASI is discovering, (b) asking crucial new questions, making new conjectures — note, this is often significantly more important, impressive, and demanding of creativity than almost any other activity a scientist participates in, and (c) thinking about alternative ways of answering the questions.

The way I think about ASI, therefore, is really as machinery that can help us see a lot more that is out there. Perhaps we can visualize ASI as ludicrously more powerful detectors and satellites that can help us see a lot more of the observable universe than we can see now. That would be mind-blowing and impressive beyond imagination, and I cannot wait to find out that the natural world is so much more peculiar and mysterious and complex and beautiful than I can imagine now. But I want to ask then -- is seeing enough? A satellite that shows us images of every object out there -- does it satisfy all our demands as scientists or, more importantly, as human beings? I do not think so. The heart and soul of scientific curiosity is our desire to understand every object we look at, from stars, supernovae, and black holes in outer space to polynomials, groups, and their representations in mathematics. ASI could open our eyes to new results every day, and we would still want to understand what is out there much more deeply than seeing alone does. As we go on that journey, we will ask new questions, come up with new theories, raise new hypotheses, and we will aim to answer them.

The scientific quest is not just about attempting to see what is behind the curtain, but to understand how it got there in the first place, why it exists, why it matters, and how it relates to each of us.