Why We shouldn't Fear the Black Box of AI in Healthcare and Everywhere by

V.J. Ponde. This article first appeared in the New York Times in January 2018.

You can also find and share it at a six and z

dot com slash AI doctor.

Our official intelligence is black box is nothing to fear.

So alongside the excitement and hype about our growing reliance on artificial intelligence,

there's a fear about the way the technology works.

A recent MIT Tech Review article titled The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI, warned that no one really knows how the most advanced

algorithms do what they do, and that could be a problem.

Thanks to this uncertainty and lack of accountability, a report by the AI Now Institute recommended that public agencies responsible for criminal justice, health care, welfare, and education shouldn't even use such technology.

So given these types of concerns, the unseeable space shouldn't even use such technology.

So given these types of concerns,

the unseeable space between where the data goes in

and the answers come out is often referred to as a black box.

Seemingly a reference to the Hardy

and actually in fact orange not black data

recorders mandated on aircraft and often examined after accidents in the context of

AI the term broadly suggests an image of being in the dark about how technology works

that we put in and provide data and models and architectures, and then computers provide us answers

while continuing to learn on their own, but in a way that's seemingly impossible

and certainly too complicated for us to understand.

There's a particular concern about this in health care, where AI is used to classify

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