I think this will be the next generation of science to some extent. The things we can understand and call explanations/reasons might be something involving 5 or 50 variables with not too many interactions between them. They have some unifying principles or equations we can fit in our head. I think many things inherently just involve far too many variables and complexity for us to understand in a neat theory and we are hitting those limits in biology & physics. Even so I'm sure we will develop better and better ways to interpret these models and get some level of understanding. Maybe we can understand them but not create them past a certain scale.
This description isn’t how science has played out. When the scale changes often the model gets simple again.
Think about how complex friction is at a molecular level. But a single coefficient is a good enough model for engineers and a continuous 1d graph is incredible.
There is also no evidence that general AI models like multilayer perceptrons are good at constructing physical models from phenomena and lots of examples where they aren’t.
The opposite seems to have had more success. Someone who understands a system constructs a model and then lets a computer determine the actual parameter values.
