“It is a problem that is already relevant, and it’s going to be much more relevant in the future,” says Tommi Jaakkola, a professor at MIT who works on applications of machine learning. Deep learning, the most common of these approaches, represents a fundamentally different way to program computers. But banks, the military, employers, and others are now turning their attention to more complex machine-learning approaches that could make automated decision-making altogether inscrutable. If you could get access to these mathematical models, it would be possible to understand their reasoning. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.Īlready, mathematical models are being used to help determine who makes parole, who’s approved for a loan, and who gets hired for a job. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. But what if one day it did something unexpected-crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The result seems to match the responses you’d expect from a human driver. Information from the vehicle’s sensors goes straight into a huge network of artificial neurons that process the data and then deliver the commands required to operate the steering wheel, the brakes, and other systems. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions.

Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Perfectly clear review 2015