Humans may not always grasp why AIs act. Don’t panic

THERE is an old joke among pilots that says the ideal flight crew is a computer, a pilot and a dog. The computer’s job is to fly the plane. The pilot is there to feed the dog. And the dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch the computer.Handing complicated tasks to computers is not new. But a recent spurt of progress in machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), has enabled computers to tackle many problems which were previously beyond them. The result has been an AI boom, with computers moving into everything from medical diagnosis and insurance to self-driving cars.