AI & Machine Learning Black Boxes: The Need for Transparency and Accountability

The black box in aviation, otherwise known as a flight data recorder, is an extremely secure device designed to provide researchers or investigators with highly factual information about any anomalies that may have led to incidents or mishaps during a flight. The black box in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning programs1 has taken on the opposite meaning. The latest approach in Machine Learning, where there have been'important empirical successes,'2 is Deep Learning, yet there are significant concerns about transparency. Developers acknowledge that the inner working of these'self-learning machines' adds an additional layer of complexity and opaqueness concerning machine behavior. Once a Machine Learning algorithm is trained, it can be difficult to understand3 why it gives a particular response to a set of data inputs.