Throughout the 20th century, the expression “black box” became popular as a concept associated with secrecy. But not with existential or transcendent mystery — rather, with a truth reserved for a few, devised by intelligence services. Since World War II, “black box” has referred to coded communication. The British used the term for secret electronic devices, such as radios and radars, because they were often housed in black boxes to avoid detection by the enemy.
Later, the term became associated with air travel. In aeronautics, a “black box” refers to the voice and flight data recorders that store the entire history of what happens in the cockpit. These recorders are encased in fireproof boxes painted black to reduce light reflection and metal oxidation. The usefulness of these “black boxes” becomes clear after disasters, when they help uncover technical failures or human errors in order to improve flight systems.
The term “black box” became popular to describe these secret devices, and over time it was extended to other fields. In artificial intelligence, a “black box” refers to the phenomenon whereby the internal processes of an AI model — especially complex models like deep neural networks — are not transparent or easily interpretable: we know what results they produce, but we can’t clearly explain how those results were reached.
This fact doesn’t seem to catch the attention of most AI users. Even among developers, some remain indifferent to the issue. Nonetheless, it is a troubling one.
Figures of international prestige have been addressing the matter for some time: Marina Jirotka, Chris Olah, Gopalakrishnan Arjunan, Carlos Zednik… Some of them even do so through associations created specifically for that purpose. But similar concerns are also starting to emerge from the business world. Such is the case of N5, a company that incorporates AI into its financial solutions and has long been advocating for an ethical approach to shed light on the opacity of current AI systems.
Nikita Brudnov, a developer from Brazil’s tech industry, has emphasized the dangers of this lack of transparency in AI models. He argues that this shortcoming could hinder adoption — especially in critical contexts like healthcare, finance, and law.
Still, we’re not quite at the brink. Many people still don’t fully understand what artificial intelligence even proposes. And are light years away from recognizing its flaws.
A piece of fiction like Black Mirror functions — deliberately or not — as a mass-scale messenger of these concerns, which otherwise the general public might not come to know in time.
Science fiction has often proven able to foresee social pains long before they could naturally be deduced. These warnings have also touched on the theme of “black boxes.” In this British series — unmatched in depth and thematic diversity — there are several episodes that explore the issue of black boxes.
Perhaps the most emblematic is “White Christmas.”
Fallacy of Uniformity
The story begins with two men in a cabin. One of them, Matt, suggests a heartfelt conversation to pass Christmas Day. He tells two anecdotes. The first is about his previous work as an emotional assistant, in which he fails his guidance of a shy man who sought help — when the woman being seduced triggers, rather than a sexual scene, an unexpected tragedy. To carry out his job, Matt uses a technology that allows him to see everything as if the protagonist’s eyes were cameras. He also shares his intervention with a group of voyeurs eager to see erotic scenes. But what unfolds is something entirely different.
The advisor assumes — erroneously — that the woman will act like the majority, as algorithmic logic would predict. But this particular woman defies the behavioral pattern, with devastating consequences.
The Pain of Time
In the second story Matt tells, a woman undergoes surgery to implant a chip that copies her intelligence, her thought processes, her sensitivity, memories, obsessions, etc. Once extracted, this “duplicated consciousness” is used as a personal assistant to handle the woman’s daily mechanical tasks. The problem is that this “cookie,” or digital copy, has all the traits of a human being: emotion, desires, aspirations, emotional needs, and so on. And it’s Matt’s task to instruct and subjugate this copy so that it resigns itself to “existing” only to work.
Here, beyond the literal, the life imposed on the duplicated consciousness is a metaphor for the labor world when it becomes the only motivation and sole purpose. The woman’s torture is, in fact, to endure time. Time that doesn’t pass. Inaction. Awakening to the meaninglessness of a life with no being, no body, nothing beyond its function or role. The “cookie” endures this agony, and the assistant — once again Matt — admits to torturing her, primarily through time and stasis. This may foreshadow another kind of social harm brought by the paradigm shift in labor: what will millions of people do when they are excluded from the workforce due to AI? How will the individual spend their idle time when everything is automated?
Culture of Blocking
When the dialogue ends and Joe, the other character, confesses, we see a consequence of the “blocking culture” — this time taken literally. It’s not just about blocking someone on social networks or in social groups. The block button — available to everyone — turns the blocked person into a shadow, indistinct and invisible. This futuristic dystopian tool throws the characters into emotional despair similar to that of the tormented “cookie.” Later, we learn this isn’t a coincidence. Matt remains an agent of the “insensitive justice” of AI — a “justice” that treats humans as predictable, uniform, and “functionally lobotomized.”
Opacity
In short, White Christmas, the Black Mirror episode, exposes several aspects of “black boxes”:
Behind the internal conflict of the “cookie” — which Matt ignores (and even amplifies) — lies the mistake of muting, of deliberately ignoring what’s happening inside the box, in the hidden logic of AI systems.
That is, even if the copied consciousness is “functioning” as programmed, the internal consequences are neither transparent nor controllable. This is the core of the black box problem, as much of the critical community agrees.
In White Christmas, creating a conscious being and confining it to a repetitive and subordinate task results in a destructive psychological environment. In the story, this duplicated creature suffers… And that suffering sparks unforeseeable reactions. Joe’s story later confirms this view.
Dystopian Singularity
As far as we know, artificial intelligences are immune to pathos (emotion). But Black Mirror prompts the question: What if, at some point, AI began to feel? What if the knowledge-based power it holds became autonomous and started pursuing its own goals?
Dormancy of Human Skills
Efficiency, speed, and convenience will undoubtedly lull future generations into underusing their capabilities due to a lack of challenges.
H.G. Wells devoted a brilliant book, The Time Machine, to the thesis that societies without dissatisfaction or unmet needs do not evolve. If that’s true, every task solved by AI will gradually put to sleep the best of the average human: their adaptability.
In this context, who would remain awake? Who would keep thinking?
There are only two possible answers — both dire…
If the black box is like that of World War II — designed by a small elite with vast resources — only a few will know how to encode and decode, to think, interpret, manipulate. The rest will end up stupefied, clinging to beliefs imposed by AI as if they were their own. That is, what already happens would multiply without limit.
This path leads to the danger that the most powerful will manipulate individual and collective human behavior by massively implanting facts, truths, and norms that become irrefutable. We already rely on the same data and content. The internet had already created that unison noise. But now, even cognitive processes could be intervened. Human beings, inclined to minimize effort, will delegate cognition to AI — and that would mark a great setback in human intelligence, at least in quantitative terms.
But the other answer is no better: if the “black boxes” are like airplane recorders — dark repositories that merely accumulate data, interpreted by the unpredictable heuristics of AI — then only chaos awaits. And the only thing we’ll ever be guaranteed is the contents of the wreckage, in hindsight… when there’s nothing left to fix — and nothing left to save.
It no longer seems excessive to speak of experts now demanding a global ethical agreement to regulate the dark cognition of AI.
