Most of the confusion here stems from the abuse of the word, "AI". That is the goal, and nothing else. "AI" does not (yet) exist. Every time we call something "

Most of the confusion here stems from the abuse of the word, "AI". That is the goal, and nothing else. "AI" does not (yet) exist. Every time we call something "an AI", we are telling a lie; and that lie turns the entire discussion away from logic and reason into magic and nonsense. When we are dealing with a system that is made of logic and reason, we can use logic and reason to construct an understanding of that system. This is the explicit approach to understanding. When we are dealing with a mysterious black box, we must take the implicit approach: using testing and inference to construct a model, we can construct an explicit understanding of that model. This is effectively the same process, but one step removed: we understand our model, not the system it applies to. That model may be incomplete and/or misaligned. The human mind is a mysterious black box. We have made a lot of progress modeling that system, but our models are not complete or perfectly aligned. While our study of the human mind is limited to the implicit approach, the human mind itself is capable of both implicit and explicit understanding. So far, no software has been able to emulate that feature. Every tech that exists today uses only one of the two approaches. > Anyway, long story short, fully explainable AI utterly sucks ass at many tasks that are like a walk on the park for blackbox AI. What you have called "fully explainable AI" is any tech that uses the explicit approach. Because everything is explicitly defined, there is a clear place for logic to exist as part of the system. Because everything is explicitly defined, there is no room for ambiguity in the system. What you have called "blackbox AI" is any tech that uses the implicit approach. Because nothing is literally defined, ambiguity can exist in the system. Because nothing is explicitly defined, there is no clear place for logic to exist in the system. But is it really a black box? The program itself is explicitly defined! We should be able to use the explicit approach to understand it, just like we do any other software.