“Insufficient data for meaningful answer” is the response that, time and time again, all those who ask the supercomputer of their time, first Multivac, then Microvac until they reach the Cosmic AC, about the inevitable reversal of the universe: entropy.

For several weeks now I’ve been wanting to share a couple of ideas that haunt my head about one of my favorite short stories, “The Last Question” by the great writer, biochemist, and thinker, Isaac Asimov. This brief history describes people and disembodied entities, separated by billions and trillions of years from each other, always asking the same question and always resorting to the superintelligent machine of the moment, at first, a fairly simple one, but, exponentially, reaching levels of intelligence that calling it “artificial” would be a joke because it, indeed, surpasses the humans’.

After reading it several times, many questions, doubts, and thoughts arise, some related to the scientific term “entropy”, others in the theological sphere related to the end of the story (I don’t want to spoil it for those of you who are going to read it so that you enjoy it as much as I did), but one of them, with philosophical and ethical nuances, stands out: are there questions to which we have no answer? That is, first, can some questions never be solved and, second, can a human being ask a question without a “meaningful” answer associated with it? If we can never get that answer, does this mean that there are truths hidden from the human being or, directly, that a truth that a human being can never reach does not exist? Aristotle, in his Book II of Metaphysics, tells us that the object of science is truth, one that is impossible to fully achieve, but that it is not possible to hide from us since, as he says, man has a rational soul that gives him the faculty of reasoning, allowing us to know. Of course, it also explains that true knowledge (episteme) is given by the knowledge of causes. Reading Kant, for example, we see that he gives rise to new concepts of truth dividing it into an analytical, synthetic, a priori, a posteriori, etc., and Leibniz opens an interesting door to address this issue with his de facto truths. With these brief examples, I don’t intend to answer these questions and, if I dared to do so, it would not be in a short article on LinkedIn. However, I encourage you, after reading this story, to think about them.

There is a final thought that I wanted to share, one related to technology and, especially, the inquisitive nature of us, human beings. In the years that have elapsed in the 21st century, years in which technology has become accessible to most of the world, especially to the western part of it, when a question arises, we tend to directly look for the answer on the Internet, the Multivac of our time. But, I find it to be an interesting fact that most of the time we do not find the answer there, we assume that it does not exist since we assume that all the “wisdom of the universe” is on this global digital platform. What would have happened if all the philosophers, mathematicians, thinkers, economists, scientists, etc., having had access to the Internet, had given up seeing that they weren’t able to find the answers to their respective questions? If you can’t find the answer to your questions, think, research, ask and, above all, use the brain that differentiates us from the rest of the animals and creatures on the earth, an essential organ that gives us two key factors to rediscover the universe: intelligence and imagination.