Marcello and I developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn’t understand, which was often, we would say “magic”—as in, “X magically does Y”—to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a gap in our understanding. It is far better to say “magic,” than “complexity” or “emergence”; the latter words create an illusion of understanding. Wiser to say “magic,” and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.
