New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

This cautionary tale, which has been told over and over again in the academic literature on machine learning,1 is probably apocryphal, but it illustrates an important issue when dealing with artificial intelligence and machine learning: What can we know about what a machine knows? The story of the tanks encodes a fundamental realisation, and one of increasing importance: whatever artificial intelligence might come to be, it will be fundamentally different, and ultimately inscrutable, to us. Despite increasingly sophisticated systems of both computation and visualisation, we are no closer today to truly understanding exactly how machine learning does what it does; we can only adjudicate the results.