Everyone wants to know: Will artificial intelligence doom mankind—or save the world? But this is the wrong question. In the near future, the biggest challenge to human control and acceptance of artificial intelligence is the technology’s complexity and opacity, not its potential to turn against us like HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This “black box” problem arises from the trait that makes artificial intelligence so powerful: its ability to learn and improve from experience without explicit instructions.

Machines learn through...