Unlike earlier generations of AI, in which people distilled a society’s understanding of reality in a program’s code, contemporary machine-learning AIs largely model reality on their own. While developers may examine the results generated by their AIs, the AIs do not “explain” how or what they learned in human terms. Nor can developers ask an AI to characterize what it has learned. Much as with humans, one cannot really know what has been learned and why (though humans can often offer explanations or justifications that, as of this writing, AI cannot).
