Would we like to know how these drugs work? Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we need to know how these drugs work? Absolutely not - gi

Would we like to know how these drugs work? Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we need to know how these drugs work? Absolutely not - given a choice between a mystery drug and having surgery without anaesthesia, I'm choosing the mystery drug every time. Phrasing the need for understanding is a bit tricky. Certainly, a person can live with, must live with, some knowledge-without-understanding in their life. But a proliferation of things beyond our understanding in many ways undermines our position, our feeling of power in the world. It seems like the broad progress of humanity, since the age of ... reason, has come through an increase in both raw data and broad understanding. And while understanding is tricky thing to describe, it seems like the rise of AI is actually helpful in describing what it isn't. Understanding is a kind of knowledge that humans can take into many domains and apply in many ways - mathematics is a prototypical example - the laws of physics, put in mathematics, can applied in a multitude of ways. In contrast, trends extracted from raw data may give us successful predictions and not tell us the reason. Suppose we have a psychiatric drug that is a pure "black box", we know that consuming this drug changes a person's behavior in somewhat predictable fashion. But it doesn't tell you whether this consumption returns someone to "normal" or simply suppresses a person's other abilities - if we're treating symptoms, we learn nothing of mental illness (given our real minds remain black boxes too). Moreover, it's not true that we deal with other people as black boxes. Rather, "folks psychology", our implicit understanding of each other's motivations, is a key part of our interpersonal relations [1]. This process may not be correct in scientific terms but this doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a key component of our experience. And overall, the proliferation of knowledge-without-understanding produces the problem of lack of broad control of the world, akin to a tool chest. Edit: Ironically, "tool box reasoning", the ability to have a group of tools available and use them as appropriate and in combination, is a pretty uniquely human ability one that gives a person a wide range of options in the world. It is itself very much a black box on a meta-level but we know quite well exists (so suppose that's a useful piece of general black box knowledge). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology