DARPA is funding projects that will try to open up AI's black boxes

Intelligence agents and military operatives may come to rely heavily on machine learning to parse huge quantities of data, and to control a growing arsenal of autonomous systems. But the U.S. military wants to make sure that this doesn't lead to blindly trusting in any algorithm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Defense Department that explores new technologies, is funding several projects that aim to make artificial intelligence explain itself. The approaches range from adding further machine-learning systems geared toward providing an explanation, to the development of new machine-learning approaches that incorporate an elucidation by design. "We now have this real explosion of AI," says David Gunning, the DARPA program manager who is funding an effort to develop AI techniques that include some explanation of their reasoning.