Chatbots and Zero Sales Resistance

Not a day goes by without we hear of the latest AI breakthroughs, such as chatbots that write up texts or generate images increasingly harder to tell apart from their human-made counterparts. These headlines come with a heavy load of hype, but even with hype factored out, a highly seductive promise stands tall, the promise to capture levels of complexity largely out of grasp for our best theories, models and simulations. Briefly, AI would supplant the time-honored Scientific Method, as we know it since Galileo's time [1, 2]. While heavily pumped up, this promise is not empty, addressing as it does, among others, one of the most vexing Achille's heels of the scientific method, the infamous Curse of Dimensionality (CoD) [3]. Indeed, CoD compounds with a profound hallmark of Complexity, namely the fact that complex systems are sneaky: they inhabit ultra-dimensional spaces but don't fill them up [4, 5, 6]. To the contrary, "interesting things" take place in ultrathin and often highly scattered portions of the huge state space available to them. Nature likes to play hide and seek and big time so. An illuminating example can be found in the book of Frenkel and Smit [7], where we learn that the chance of making a sensible Monte Carlo move in the state space of hundred hard-spheres (please note, hundred, not Avogadro's) is about 10