The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Will new inventions be beyond our grasp? Previously creators could explain how something worked and why it did what it did, even if this required vast detail. That’s increasingly no longer true. Many technologies and systems are becoming so complex that they’re beyond the capacity of any one individual to truly understand: quantum computing and other technologies operate toward the limits of what can be known. A paradox of the coming wave is that its technologies are largely beyond our ability to comprehend at a granular level yet still within our ability to create and use. In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable. You can’t walk someone through the decision-making process to explain precisely why an algorithm produced a specific prediction. Engineers can’t peer beneath the hood and easily explain what caused something to happen. GPT-4, AlphaGo, and the rest are black boxes, their outputs and decisions based on opaque and intricate chains of minute signals. Autonomous systems can and may be explainable, but the fact that so much of the coming wave operates at the edge of what we can understand should give us pause. We won’t always be able to predict what these autonomous systems will do next; that’s the nature of autonomy.

Built Beyond Understanding: The Black-Box Paradox