Don’t Make AI Artificially Stupid in the Name of Transparency

Artificial intelligence systems are going to crash some of our cars, and sometimes they're going to recommend longer sentences for black Americans than for whites. We know this because they've already gone wrong in these ways. But this doesn’t mean that we should insist—as many, including the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation, do—that artificial intelligence should be able to explain how it came up with its conclusions in every non-trivial case.

Demanding explicability sounds fine, but achieving it may require making artificial intelligence artificially stupid. And given the promise of the type of AI called machine learning, a dumbing-down of this technology could mean failing to diagnose diseases, overlooking significant causes of climate change, or making our educational system excessively one-size-fits all. Fully tapping the power of machine learning may well mean relying on results that are literally impossible to explain to the human mind.