Just curiosity. What else do you need?

LEE WOO-YOUNG
The author is a HCMC professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

It happened at an international academic seminar. American mathematician Alan Shields (1927-89) was presenting on the long-standing unsolved problem of the invariant subspace problem. The presentation was quite boring as the problem was too hard.

One attendee asked him why he wanted to solve it so badly. Shields was reluctant at first and simply said it’s because the problem was presented in front of him.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and a mathematician, wrote a book titled “An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry.” New York University Professor Morris Kline (1908-1992) wrote a foreword. He wrote that unsolved problems constantly tempt human intellect and that the greatest intellectual pleasure comes from the fight against the hard-to-grasp truths. A great work presents unsolved problems before us and keeps us from falling into mental lethargy, the mathematician from NYU added.

What if there is a solution to all the world’s problems? Humans will certainly stop being curious. The human spirit will be helpless and the brain will be stiffened. That’s the true reason why people are afraid of artificial intelligence. But the core theory dealing with artificial intelligence is mathematics.

Mathematics will not develop in a linear way. Even today, there are many problems that have been unsolved for hundreds of years. As long as there are unresolved problems in mathematics, curiosity will not stop, nor will the human spirit sleep.

The message contained in Allen Shields’ dry answer is clear: Curiosity is the only answer. As long as curiosity is alive, we should not be afraid of AI. Ironically, what created AI was curiosity and what will overcome AI is also curiosity.

Come to think of it, Greek mythology had the power to foresee the future. The curiosity that Zeus gave to Pandora brought a disaster to humanity, but it also left the last hope to protect humanity.