The Mysterious Future of AI

We built artificial intelligence. But do we actually understand what we built?

AI can write, reason, code, analyze images, and solve problems at astonishing speed. Yet beneath those abilities lies one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time: we can measure what AI does far more easily than we can explain how it does it-or what it is becoming.

In The Mysterious Future of AI, neuroscientist Moawiah Naffaa approaches this mystery from an unexpected direction. What if understanding advanced AI requires more than engineering? What if we must investigate it the way scientists investigate other complex systems-through its history, internal organization, symptoms, mechanisms, interventions, and future trajectory?

From hallucinations and hidden mechanisms to the possibility that two equally capable AI systems could have radically different futures, this book takes readers inside the emerging science of understanding machine intelligence. It introduces a provocative new framework-the Artificial Patient-and asks whether the next great challenge of AI will be not building more powerful machines, but learning how to diagnose what learning has made them become.

The future of AI may not be a question of how intelligent machines become.

It may depend on whether we can understand them before they become something we never learned how to explain.