> This kind of breathless "Oh we CAN'T understand!" editorializing gets clicks because machine learning is so strange to most people, but it's terrible. There'

> This kind of breathless "Oh we CAN'T understand!" editorializing gets clicks because machine learning is so strange to most people, but it's terrible. There's also a fringe benefit here. If "we can't understand" what it's doing, then that assumption can appear to weaken the "auditability" argument for deploying FLOSS in life-critical AI systems. (I.e., freedom 1 from the GPL.) I'll bet the argument will be put forward with more frequency over the next few years, especially as self-driving cars become more prominent. Perhaps "appear to weaken" is too strong an assertion. But I can imagine a consumer safety advocate arguing for code to be auditable by outside parties just like Signal can be, and a PR spokesperson deflecting that AI is "beyond our understanding" and therefore not subject to the same standard.