A prediction can be useful without explaining why something happens. Causation concerns how an event, condition, object, or process influences another. It asks more than whether two events occur together—or which one came first. section 11.22
The heart and blood circulation
The heart’s pumping action causes blood to circulate. A system that finds patterns in medical data may still fail to infer this basic relationship. That limits its ability to trace chains of causes that could help with diagnosis or treatment. section 8.0
Understanding causes is an aim for next-generation AI: a system that can reason about underlying factors could plan and act more effectively than one that only recognizes correlations. Encoding cause and effect in a computer program remains a challenge, however. A predictive result should not be mistaken for a causal explanation. section 11.22 section 8.0
