Intelligence Is Not Opaque

One of the most interesting aspects of machine learning is how opaque it can be. Often it is not clear at all why the algorithms make the decisions they do, even if those decisions turn out to solve the problems the machines were tasked with. This occurs because machine learning methods rely on blind explorations of the statistical distinctions between, say, useful email and spam that live in some vast database of emails. But the kind of reasoning we use to solve a problem usually involves a logic of association that can be clearly explained. Human reasoning is never blind.