Does the No Miracles Argument Apply to AI?

Darrell P. Rowbottom, William Peden, and André Curtis-Trudel

Does the No Miracles Argument Apply to AI?

According to the standard no miracles argument, science’s predictive success is best explained by the approximate truth of its theories. In contemporary science, however, machine learning systems, such as AlphaFold2, are also remarkably predictively successful. Thus, we might ask what best explains such successes. Might these AIs accurately represent critical aspects of their targets in the world? And if so, does a variant of the no miracles argument apply to these AIs?We argue for an affirmative answer to these questions. We conclude that if the standard nomiracles argument is sound, an AI-specific no miracles argument is also sound.