Kenneth Cukier
198 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬
gies, at their most advanced levels, do
not merely assist human knowledge;
they surpass it.BRAVE NEW WORLD
A sense o respect for the human mind
and humility about its limitations runs
through the essays in Possible Minds. “As
platforms for intelligence, human brains
are far from optimal,” notes Frank
Wilczek, a Nobel laureate in physics. At
the same time, the book is Ãlled with a
healthy deprecation o the glistening
new tool. “Current ¬ machine-learning
algorithms are, at their core, dead
simple stupid. They work, but they work
by brute force,” writes the computer
scientist Alex Pentland.
So ¬ is good, but bad, too. It is clever
but dim, the savior o civilization and the
destroyer o worlds. The mark o genius,
as ever, is to carry two contradictory
thoughts in one’s mind at the same time.FOR THE RECORD
“The New Revolution in Military
Aairs” (May/June 2019) misstated the
company at which the author, Christian
Brose, works. It is Anduril Industries,
not Anduril Strategies.
“A World Safe for Capital” (May/
June 2019) incorrectly referred to
Geneva as the Swiss capital. The capital
o Switzerland is Bern.
Nicolas van de Walle’s review o
Secessionism in African Politics (May/June
2019) misstated the year in which the
island o Anjouan rejoined the Com-
oros. It was 2001, not 2002.∂The implications are signiÃcant. Soci-
ety faces a tradeo between performance
and explainability. The dilemma is that
the most obscure systems also oer the
best performance. Sadly, this matter is
poorly treated in Possible Minds. Many o
its contributors vaunt transparency as a
value in itself. But none delves into the
complexity o the issue or grapples
with the notion that transparency might
create ineciency. Consider a hypotheti-
cal ¬ system that improves the accuracy
o a diagnostic test for a fatal medical
condition by one percent. Without the
technology, there is a 90 percent chance
o making an accurate diagnosis; with it,
there is a 91 percent chance. Are we
really willing to condemn one out o 100
people to death just because, although
we might have saved him or her, we
wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly
how we did? On the other hand, i we
use the system, nine out o 100 people
might feel they’ve been misdiagnosed by
an inscrutable golem.
This raises deeper questions about
the relationship between humans and
technology. The reliance on ever more
complex technological tools reduces our
autonomy, since no one, not even the
people who design these tools, really
understands how they work. It is almost
axiomatic that as computing has ad-
vanced, humans have become increas-
ingly divorced from “ground truth,” the
reality o the world that data try to
represent but can do so only imperfectly.
The new challenge is qualitatively
dierent, however, since ¬ technolo-
Foreign Aairs (ISSN 00157120), July/August 2019, Volume 98, Number 4. Published six times annually (January, March, May, July,
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