In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a foggy runway in the Canary Islands. It remains the deadliest accident in aviation history. In the aftermath, investigators didn’t rely on eyewitness testimony or pilot memory. They dove into a twisted, fire-scorched device buried in the tail of the aircraft: the Flight Data Recorder .
The Industrial Revolution gave us complexity, but not mystery. If a steam engine seized, you could take a wrench to it. If a radio broke, you could probe the vacuum tubes. The logic was linear. The code was explicit. blackbox
In 2016, ProPublica investigated an algorithm called COMPAS, used in US courts to predict recidivism. The black box returned a "risk score." ProPublica found it was twice as likely to falsely label Black defendants as future criminals than white defendants. The company that made the algorithm denied the bias. Because the box was black, both sides could claim the math supported them. In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a
