The Importance of Noise
On the role of uncertainty in evolution, markets, neuroscience, and AI
The world is unpredictable in many ways.
This has been the natural state of affairs for all living beings fighting an uphill battle for survival within an ever-evolving world. And while modern life has given us more certainties, with scientific theories setting out to explain the mess around us, science also has been confronted with its own limitations: while Newtonian physics argues that if we have sufficient information of a system, we can predict its future perfectly, chaos theory teaches that being able to predict something to decent levels of precision is very different than predicting it to perfect precision: if we err by only the smallest of margins, our predictions will quickly deteriorate further into the future until they end up being completely useless.
The uncertainty of our predictions is intertwined with the complexity of our environment. Given that most environments we find ourselves in are extremely complex, there is a limit to what we can forecast.
Our temporal discounting of future rewards captures this implicit assumption: we put more emphasis on the present than the future precisely because predictions are frequently flawed, and future rewards are always more uncertain than present rewards…
