Some people who work with these systems believe there is something fundamentally unknowable about this technology. Some even describe it as a different kind of being. Do you believe that?

It is not a new species or being. It is definitely software. It is definitely math. I understand why people feel that way when they cannot fully trace how a decision was made. But opacity is an engineering challenge. It is a transparency and interpretability problem that we can work on. The fact that a system is complex does not make it mystical.