Artificial intelligence has come into its renaissance. With articles now appearing daily shouting “Machine Learning”, or “Artificial Intelligence Agents”, AI has indelibly impacted world. AI’s presence is such that Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, said “[AI] is one of the most important things that humanity is working on. It’s more profound than, I don’t know, electricity or fire.” [6] Though many strides have been made in AI, it is still in its nascency. And it is here, right now, in these next few years, that will most likely shape the usage of AI for the foreseeable future.

The reason AI development has been able to seemingly skyrocket in terms of progress — from AI being able to detect pneumonia better than traditional radiologists [7] to the quickly approaching ubiquity of digital home assistants like Google Home or Amazon Echo — is the sheer amount of data developers can use that has been generated by people through their internet usage. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Microsoft, government organizations — all of these companies and organizations can collect any manner of information on one person using the internet. Compound that with the omnipresence of technology through most of the world and you have an infinite supply of data.

Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence use the abundance of this information — whether in corporate or research-based groups — to train mathematical algorithms that can make various predictions on given user activity. For example, this could be something like Amazon noticing you like to buy a particular product on its website. Later on, you could see recommendations popping up for similar or related products. This is convenient. It helps us be more efficient. But. Without our realizing, our whole experience can be altered in an instant by technologies backed by AI.

There has been much discussion about the sort of conclusions AI agents can be making, because, generally speaking, we don’t exactly know how they are coming to those conclusions. To achieve meaningful results used by the likes of Google or Amazon, user data is often transformed through many mathematical means that are inscrutable to even the most experienced computer scientists — this Nautilus article and Technology Review article discusses the phenomena even more (albeit in more technical terms) — and has caused much unease in the academic community [8, 9].

The inscrutability of AI, as an article by the New York Times written by Vijay Pande posits, is nothing to fear — in and of itself at least. An example they use is of a doctor making a diagnosis. The doctor can make the diagnosis based on experience, information, and observations, but she is never expected to explain her whole process. Pande argues that a similar approach should be made with AI [10]. The reason why these two sides have so hotly debated the issue is because who is at the center of these developments: us.