We Don't Always Know What AI Is Thinking--And That Can Be Scary

"Algorithm" might be one of the most popular terms that almost no one understands. Not many people have PhDs in data science, and even those experts don't always know what's happening. "It's not clear even from a technical perspective that every aspect of AI algorithms can be understood by humans," says Guruduth Banavar, IBM's chief science officer for cognitive computing, which is what IBM calls AI. Artificial intelligence is making decisions by reviewing people's medical tests in hospitals, credit histories in banking, job applications in some HR systems, even criminal risk factors in the justice system. Yet it's not always clear how the computers are thinking.