Prediction Without Understanding

The periodic table predicted germanium in 1871 and proved correct in 1886. It organized all of chemistry. It was indispensable. And the man who built it, and everyone who used it for two generations, had no idea why it worked, what produced the periodicity, or what an element fundamentally was. The explanation—the quantum structure of the atom, the filling of electron shells—arrived half a century later from an entirely different direction, one that could not have been discovered by staring at the table. This half-century of prediction-without-understanding is the most exact historical model available for the present condition of artificial intelligence: systems that predict the next word, the protein's fold, the image's completion, the material's property with accuracy that is often superhuman, whose training procedure is known, and whose trained internal structure is not. The models are periodic tables whose quantum mechanics has not been discovered—predictive instruments running ahead of any