Sure, A.I. Is Powerful--But Can We Make It Accountable?

Say you apply for home insurance and get turned down. You ask why, and the company explains its reasoning: Your neighborhood is at high risk for flooding, or your credit is dodgy. Now imagine you apply to a firm that uses a machine-learning system, instead of a human with an actuarial table, to predict insurance risk. After crunching your info--age, job, house location and value--the machine decides, nope, no policy for you. You ask the same question: "Why?" Nobody can answer, because nobody understands how these systems--neural networks modeled on the human brain--produce their results.