Demystifying the black box

'The Black Box' is an expression people use to describe something mysterious that does something cool, but hard for people to understand how it works. Data visualization helps us understand the black box by putting a friendly, usable wrapper around a collection of inputs-- data, algorithms or processes that have not been made user-friendly yet.. In this environment of AI, Machine learning and various clever algorithms, black boxes are proliferating all around us. We are asked to trust them all the time-- cars that operate on auto-pilot, various recommendation engines that suggest things they think you will like, hyper-local weather reports telling you it will start raining 5 minutes from now at your exact location. But how do we know whether to trust them?