Why We Need to See Inside AI's Black Box

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. For some people, the term "black box" brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence. AI black boxes refer to AI systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user.