[gflan]

Except Clarke wasn't referring to the black-boxiness of said advanced tech, was he?

[michaelmior]

Not explicitly, I think no. But in some sense, yes. Arguably any tech which we don't really understand is a black box. I think the lack of understanding how something works is a large part of the "magical" effect.

[visarga]

I think LLM smarts is actually language smarts. Language is accessible, we can track how it creates these capabilities.