No, an AI cannot know the future and never will..
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No, an AI cannot know the future and never will..<br>Confronting the Chaos and Demons
Pulkit Sharma<br>Jul 19, 2026
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https://xkcd.com/248/<br>“A butterfly flaps its wings… the resulting air movement creates a chain of disruptions. This disruption propagates across the ocean, eventually feeding into a massive, swirling hurricane.”
“A butterfly flaps its wings… the resulting air movement creates the sufficient force required to dislodge an extra spore in the air which would then seed the mushroom in your garden”
Let’s call these sequence of events as event chains. These event chains are something which us humans have been capturing using different modalities (audio, text, images, movies) for quite sometime now. And as you know, now happily handed over as inputs to train AI models. But, the human experience has captured only some these event chains, and the ones we have captured have some issues.<br>The most glaring issue is that most of them are for separate events ! We never record multiple event chains for the same event.<br>Even if there are multiple descriptions of the “US Iran War”, all of them exist at a higher dimension then the ones where the event chains exist actually exist. Our experiences or descriptions of the “US Iran War” are different. Some support it, some don’t. Some don’t know about it. The AI has to be fed all perspectives (ideally). These descriptions do not describe a single event in time, but a large set of events across hours or days. The AI has to somehow make a mental model from all the disparate event chains we provide in training data and make sense of it to create a coherent representation of real life events.<br>Another issue is that the event chains are captured in a particular resolution, a particular level of detail. Only the high level details which matter to us humans are available to the LLMs. The LLMs never get to see the true low level event chains which caused an event or created by an event. The LLMs are dependent on us humans to invent the modalities, encode them appropriately and then use them for training the LLMs. In the current state, giving high resolution event chains (on the level of neuronal activities, atoms, quantum states) thankfully, is impossible. We give the information we have captured to the AI and the AI continues to live on that plane of meta-events (as we do), it is never able to move beyond it. And it may never feel the need to do so, thinking from a mechanistic interpretability perspective. Those will be super-human, para-human thoughts, which I am sure most of us may have had at some point in our lives, but now we know were just thoughts of pure fantasy and are basically impractical. The AI may think the same.<br>Another issue with our current modalities, is that they are finite. They stop some where. On the contrary, does an event chain in reality truly stop ? But our movies, poems, research papers, code, video. all do. We die, things die.<br>There is a beginning AND there is an end. This is the reality for the LLM mind as well. It has to stop and present something, it has a rule: the end-of-sequence-token should emit.<br>I believe this is a fundamental blocker which will hold back LLMs for quite some time. The LLM is stuck in a digital era, stopping, dying after every API response. We attempt to keep it alive by giving it access to memory, tool calling. Reviving it via loops and harnesses, but the fact remains that it dies immediately after it is done emitting the last token. In its inner world, it has to resolve, make sure all the simulated event chains end. And for that it has to collapse the wave function, i.e. follow some probabilities.<br>But as everyone knows, the event chains in real life never truly stop. New ones spawn and then continue on their endless journeys. There is no true starting point and there is no true endpoint. Us humans just come in ask our questions and then find our answers. We create our start and end points. A lot of violence has happened between humans on this planet because we don’t align on the starting points of event chains. Frames of references shift who are the oppressors and who are oppressed.<br>What should an AI do ? should it consider all the events since the beginning of humanity ? or before humanity ? Should it consider each injustice ? Each revenge ? It all comes down to which part of humanity created the most amount of data in the training set.. therefore the predictions for the future an AI does would be wildly incorrect as it does not (it cannot) consider humanity as a whole.<br>In the current design, an LLM can at best attempt to reason and predict what would happen in the CJP protest in India in the next 2 days. It’s a complex problem as it will acknowledge and say. But in my opinion, it is severely underestimating the complexity.
In reality, a particular human could maybe just get enough adrenaline on a day to throw a stone at a...