Opening Artificial Intelligence's Black Box

During the 1830s, England entered into the Industrial Revolution's era of big data. Its government began producing vast troves of statistical information about everything from the cost of "pease and beans" to the export of hats. Processing all that information was time-consuming. Its civil service had to employ an army of clerks to read handwritten census records from every single parish, tabulate the data on large sheets of paper, make tick marks, count the ticks, fold the pages over, and convert everything into new tables, over and over again for every statistic the government wanted to know. They were known as "computers." Many suffered nervous breakdowns from all the ticking and counting.