About whether neural network decisions need to be explainable in human terms.
Has this happened?
Yes 19 (17%)Not sure 35 (31%)No 59 (52%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether neural network decisions need to be explainable in human terms.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Explanation is hugely important, and the lack of it was one of the factors that killed NNs in the 90s. The ability to explain was also one of the reasons rule-based systems succeeded as well as they did, despite having huge disadvantages vs NNs for many problem domains.
AI for high-consequence decision-making is going to need the automatic feature extraction and robustness of NNs coupled with the explanatory transparency of expert systems. That's been the holy grail for almost 40 years.