[xanderlewis]

To the extent that machine learning models are a black box, it is ‘magic’.

Of course, at the lowest levels it’s entirely understood but it’s the emergent properties that give many the feeling of magic — and I would argue quite reasonably so.

…for people who use ‘magic’ to refer to things that accomplish complicated tasks whilst abstracting it all away so that it looks easy (much like how I can copy and paste between my iDevices on a LAN and it magically works), anyway.

> Of course magic can cure cancer because… it’s magic!

If you take magic to mean something supernatural, then yes. It’s essentially of the same form as ‘god is perfect; a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn’t; therefore god exists’-type arguments.