Algorithms are Black Boxes, That is Why We Need Explainable AI
Artificial Intelligence offers a lot of advantages for organisations by creating better and more efficient organisations, improving customer services with conversational AI and reducing a wide variety of risks in different industries. Although we are only at the beginning of the AI revolution that is upon us, we can already see that artificial intelligence will have a profound effect on our lives. As a result, AI governance is also becoming increasingly important, if we want to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence.
Data governance and ethics have always been important and a few years ago, I developed ethical guidelines for organisations to follow, if they want to get started with big data. Such ethical guidelines are becoming more important, especially now since algorithms are taking over more and more decisions. Automated decision-making is great until it has a negative outcome for you and you can’t change that decision or, at least, understand the rationale behind that decision. In addition, algorithms offer tremendous opportunities, but they have two major flaws:
Algorithms are extremely literal; they pursue their (ultimate) goal literally and do exactly what is told while ignoring any other, important, consideration;
Algorithms are black boxes; whatever happens inside an algorithm is only known …