How is that new? People built a gnomon, a stick was thrust into the soil and ta-da. No doubt it happened far before any writing system was out there. So it still took human quite some time to come with a compelling helio-centric model to cast some grabbable explanation of it all, even if you take Aristarchus of Samos as a pionner in this field.
Ok, maybe on some perspective I’m with you here. There are things happening no-one even those on the edge of the fringe can understand anymore how it works while it does. Or at least that is how it seems to be from my narrow perspective on AI.
On the other hand, I don’t feel like you need to know how a compiler work, let alone the hardware architecture it targets, before you can go through your first hello world program or even build some useful software on top of frameworks/library treated at blackboxes. So "I have no idea what I’m doing" in this perspective is probably as old as CS/informatics.
There's a huge difference between "I don't understand how X works", and "Nobody understands how X works".
Also, every single abstract is leaky, so often it's a difference between "I don't need to know how X works now", and "I can never find out how X works because it's simply not knowable".
