Sure Artificially Intelligent Machines Will Learn. But How Will We Make Them Accountable?

The opacity of machine learning isn’t just an academic problem. More and more places use the technology for everything from image recognition to medical diagnoses. All that decision­making is, by definition, unknowable—and that makes ­people uneasy. My friend Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist, warns about “Moore’s law plus inscrutability.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says we need “algorithmic accountability.”