even more symphonies they’d probably be great too. Unfortunately he’s dead. Wouldn't it be nice if we could sample his old symphonies and make new ones whenever we want?2°° In the future we’ll invite Al into our lives to harmonize away many of the problems we face, not merely making up for Mozart’s inconvenient mortality. “AI Agents” will linger along side us. They will compose versions of themselves we'll not quite grasp, even as we appreciate their efficient magic. “Al is both freedom from programming and freedom from understanding,” runs one programmer’s line2®!. Today machines that once demanded millions of lines of code can function with a fraction of that. Instructions are sent to machine learning systems; the programs do the rest. Such designs balance their mystery with efficacy. They speak to and learn from each other too. Part of the reason that the the “Does it think like a human?” Turing Test will be insufficient in the future is that the machines are not learning from only from humans. They are learning from each other. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. The distinguished physicists George Ellis and Joe Silk, who spent a lifetime trying to stand on Newton and Einstein’s shoulders to grasp answers about gravity or the future of our universe, electrified many of their peers in 2015 with by wondering if perhaps too much of science had become unscientific, unverifiable, unreliable. The great grand ideas of our day, notions like string theory or dark matter, differ in a crucial way from Newton's laws of motion or Einstein’s principles: They cannot seem to be tested and significantly proved. And this had fired a trend among younger physicits: Perhaps there was no need for proof. To Ellis and Silk this seemed an awful retreat, dragging physics back to a pre- Enlightenment age of conjecture, superstition and instinct. “This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn,” they wrote. “Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the obse