Explaining why

The emerging crisis in the tech world

There was a deathly silence in that vast hall of a thousand-plus data mining and artificial intelligence practitioners in New York City last week, when the speaker made the following statement: “If you reject a consumer loan application and the consumer asks why her loan was rejected, you will get into regulatory trouble if you say, ‘I don’t know, the algorithm did it’”. Considering that the conclusions that algorithms make, be it in loan approvals or in deciding which stock a hedge fund should buy or sell, or in health care, are treated as sacred truths, this sudden demand for