The point of the article was that we don’t have a way of predicting the position at a point in time, without calculating all of the interim steps.

An analogy would be the ancient mathematicians aversion to infinites (Calculus); also, being unable to imagine non-Euclidean planes.

There may be better tools out there that we haven’t considered, because it’s so far removed from our intuition.

Edit: Was it a Vernor Vinge book, where humans had a small (but great) advantage over more established, space-faring aliens because of their ability to handle infinites (calulus)? Whereas all aliens relied on numerical/computional approximations.