How Robots Could Teach Us to Trust AI

The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere in our lives. It helps us pick movies to stream, recommends old friends to reconnect with, and autocompletes our most pressing questions in search engines.

Modern AIs are powerful machines, ingesting reams of data and outputting useful relationships between data points. If you manage a baseball team, you can create an AI model that will take factors like the weather, the opposing pitcher and other aspects of the game situation to determine which batter to substitute to improve your probability of winning. The AI won’t tell you why it selected batter A over batter B over batter C, only that batter A provides the best chance for an optimal outcome like hitting a home run. But, if you had to select the next batter from the stands, its recommendations would be useless.