GoKawiilElla Watkins-Dulaney for Asimov Press.
In On Exactitude in Science, the writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire so devoted to cartography that its mapmakers draw a map as large and detailed as the empire itself. “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,” Borges writes, “inhabited by Animals and Beggars.” Borges’s map is a parable for knowledge, and one of its lessons is that too much detail can quickly become impractical — a map at that scale would be perfect but useless.
But with today’s AI systems, one might wonder if such a map is so absurd after all. Computers and the Internet have already helped us to digitize much of human knowledge, and AI enables us to scan it quickly and easily. For instance, large language models are trained on trillions of words spanning much of recorded human knowledge. In biology, systems like AlphaFold learn from large databases to predict a protein’s folded structure from its amino acid sequence.
This means that, in some domains, something resembling Borges’s life-sized map has become extremely useful. And given the rate of progress on this front, it may seem like advancing science now simply requires building ever larger and more navigable versions of such AI systems, effectively mapping every field.
A lack of practicality, however, was never the sole flaw of Borges’s map. The deeper problem is that adding detail only gives you more of the same kind of information — more roads, more mountains, more villages — when what you might need is a completely different schematic.
Consider the map of the London Underground. Until 1933, the map plotted stations at geographically accurate locations in London. But this made central London, where most stations clustered, an unreadable tangle, while the outer suburbs, devoid of relevant data, took up most of the space. The draughtsman Harry Beck solved this inefficiency by abandoning geographic accuracy and instead redrawing the network as a circuit diagram of colored lines and evenly spaced stations.
A pocket map of London’s Underground system in 1908.
Harry Beck’s 1933 map of the London Underground.
A scientific paradigm can also be thought of as a kind of map, but unlike Beck, scientists do not usually know in advance what their maps will be used for. Instead, new paradigms are driven by the desire to explain complex phenomena with a simple and unified set of principles. Such principles tend to have knock-on implications that stretch far beyond the phenomena that inspired them.
For instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, electricity and magnetism were described by a patchwork of separately discovered laws, each explaining a different phenomenon. The physicist James Clerk Maxwell simplified the field by replacing this patchwork with four short equations. But they also implied the existence of electromagnetic waves that could travel through space, including low-frequency waves no one had yet detected. These waves eventually became the basis for radio.
... continue reading