AI knows things it can't articulate. Humans use things they can't understand. Between machine intuition and human ignorance lies ghost knowledge—real, functional, opaque.
Your loan was approved by a model that can't explain why. The treatment prescribed came from patterns no human can see. The route you drove was optimized by algorithms processing incomprehensible variables. It works. Nobody knows how.
Building on Ghosts
This isn't black-box programming where someone understands the code. This is emergent knowledge—patterns in trillion-parameter spaces, decisions in dimensions we can't visualize, correlations that predict perfectly but mean nothing.
We're building on ghost foundations. Critical systems run on processes too complex to audit, too accurate to abandon. Ghost knowledge.
Doctors diagnose through AI they can't explain to patients who wouldn't understand. Engineers optimize using tools beyond comprehension. Traders profit from patterns visible only to machines. The ghost works.
Each AI generation creates more ghost knowledge, trains the next, compounds opacity. We're not just using tools we don't understand—we're using tools built by tools we don't understand.
Civilization runs on ghosts now.