Coexisting with incompleteness

On clear nights, when I look up to the sky, I still get lost in the magnificence of all that I see. Twisting my neck, I try to look up straight and wonder about distances, light, beauty and other worlds. And I know I am not the only one. I share this amazement with millions, perhaps billions, who have long been fascinated by the celestial wonders. It was perhaps unsurprising that last week, my family and I, did something unusual: we turned on our TV. On April 1st, around 6:35 pm, we felt an extraordinary sense of excitement as we heard the countdown, saw a big ball of fire, and were mesmerised as Artemis II pierced the sky. It is hard not to be in awe of the event. One can agree or disagree with the goals of the mission, but one cannot simply dismiss the tremendous scientific achievement underpinning the launch. Millions of parts and processes, governed by equations and models, delivering a precise answer.

While precision in predictability is the cornerstone of how machines work, on their own and in synergy with other parts of the system, the same success in prediction does not quite work when it comes to us, the humans. We often think that with our extensive models and approaches, new techniques and prior experiences, we have 'figured it out'. The reality is not quite the same.

In December 2021, after spearheading the Covid-19 response with billions of dollars and experts with decades of experience, Dr Francis Collins, the head of the US National Institutes of Health, regretted that despite having vaccines that worked so well, human behaviour remained an enigma to him. "I never imagined a year ago, when those vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people who had not taken advantage of them," he said. He blamed misinformation and disinformation – but the bigger question at the core of this response remains unanswered. Who do people trust, and why? Why can't our models predict how someone will behave under a certain situation? What makes us believe or dismiss something?

The issue is not simply about health, or trust in information, it is also about ideas someone may have, and risks an individual may take. Intelligence agencies – even the famed ones with deep pockets, latest technology of the time, army of informants and supposedly highly gifted individuals – get things wrong all the time. They think a given event would lead to people coming to the streets and they would topple the government. Outside governments, with their own interests, act relying on this information. But nothing happens – no protests, no reaction, no toppling of the government. The people act in exactly the opposite ways of what the intelligence agencies predict.

Sometimes, information by these organisations suggests everything is under control, and will be so for foreseeable future, and within a few months the entire system collapses spectacularly. People end up in the streets when the prediction based on models, technology and informants had been otherwise. Despite the resources and models, these organisations fail to predict the most basic of human emotions – love, honour, trust, respect and our relationship with the community, both real and imagined. The pieces of those failures are picked up, with the hope that this set of events would allow for a better predictive model, only to fail again.

In a world where new technology is unveiled at a dazzling pace, and the fanfare (propaganda?) around them is just as sharp, maybe the reality is not how technology will allow us to control all future events, but to come to terms that human behaviour and emotions are never going to follow our structures of. Maybe we will never be the obedient machines – and there is good reason to stay that way. Maybe our understanding will remain incomplete – and we should learn to live with that incompleteness, and not destroy lives and landscapes believing that we or any individual or a group on the planet can predict, and control, the future.