>> I think we will find this not to be the case. And of course, many people like me do think that the ability to predict well enough implies the ability to do everything else.

That's a debate that's been going on for a long time. For a while I've kind of waded in it unbeknownst to me, because it's mainly a thing in the philosophy of science and I have no background in that sort of thing. So far I only got a whiff of a much larger discussion when I watched Lex Friedman's interview with Vladimir Vapnik. Here's a link:

https://youtu.be/STFcvzoxVw4?t=64

Vapnik basically says there's two groups in science, the instrumentalists, who are happy to build models that are only predictive, and the realists, who want to build explanatory models.

To clarify, a predictive model is one that can only predict future observations, based on past observations, possibly with high accuracy. An explanatory model is one that not only predicts, but also explains past and future observations, according to some pre-existing scientific theory.

For me, it makes sense that explanatory models are more powerful, by definition. An explanatory model is also predictive, but a predictive model is not explanatory. And once an explanatory model is found, once we understand why things turn out the way they do, our ability to predict also improves, tremendously so.

My favourite exmaple of this is the epicyclical model of astronomy, that dominated for a couple thousand years. Literally. It went on from classical Greece and Rome, all the way to Copernicus, who may have put the Earth in the center of the universe, but still kept it on a perfect circular orbit with epicycles. Epicycles persisted for so long because they were damn good at predicting future observations, but they had no explanatory power and, as it turned out, the whole theory was mere overfitting. It took Kepler, with his laws of planetary motion, to finally explain what was going on. And then of course, Newton waltzed in with his law of universal gravitation, and explained Kepler's laws as a consequence of the latter. I guess I don't have to wax lyrical about Newton and why his explanatory, and not simply predictive, theory, changed everything, astronomy being just one science that was swept away in the epochal wave.

So, no, I don't agree: prediction is what you do until you have an explanation. It's not the final goal, and it's certainly not enough. The only thing that will ever be enough is to figure out how the world works.

I expect it will take some time.

Thanks for the links, I'll have a look.