The Conversation, on understanding neural networks
AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why Shutterstock/Valentyn640 David Beer, University of York In 1956, during a year-long trip to London and in his early 20s, the mathematician and theoretical biologist Jack D. Cowan visited Wilfred Taylor and his strange new “learning machine”. On his arrival he was baffled by the “huge bank of apparatus” that confronted him. Cowan could only stand by and watch “the machine doing its thing”.