An artificial intelligence called Libratus beats four of the worlds best poker players in Pittsburgh last week. Photograph: Carnegie Mellon University

First it was checkers (draughts to you and me), then chess, then Jeopardy!, then Go and now poker. One after another, these games, all of which require significant amounts of intelligence and expertise if they are to be played well, have fallen to the technology we call artificial intelligence (AI). And as each of these milestones is passed, speculation about the prospect of superintelligence (the attainment by machines of human-level capabilities) reaches a new high before the media caravan moves on to its next obsession du jour. Never mind that most leaders in the field regard the prospect of being supplanted by super-machines as exceedingly distant (one has famously observed that he is more concerned about the dangers of overpopulation on Mars): the solipsism of human nature means that even the most distant or implausible threat to our uniqueness as a species bothers us.

The public obsession with the existential risks of artificial superintelligence is, however, useful to the tech industry because it distracts attention from the type of AI that is now part of its core business. This is weak AI and is a combination of big data and machine-learning algorithms that ingest huge volumes of data and extract patterns and actionable predictions from them. This technology is already ubiquitous in the search engines and apps we all use every day. And the trend is accelerating: the near-term strategy of every major technology company can currently be summarised as AI Everywhere.

The big data/machine-learning combination is powerful and enticing. It can and often does lead to the development of more useful products and services search engines that can make intelligent guesses about what the user is trying to find, movies or products that might be of interest, sources of information that one might sample, connections that one might make and so on. It also enables corporations and organisations to improve efficiency, performance and services by learning from the huge troves of data that they routinely collect but until recently rarely analysed.

Human freedoms and options are increasingly influenced by opaque, inscrutable algorithms

Theres no question that this is a powerful and important new technology and it has triggered a gadarene stampede of venture and corporate capital. We are moving into what one distinguished legal scholar calls the black box society, a world in which human freedoms and options are increasingly influenced by opaque, inscrutable algorithms. Whose names appear on no-fly lists? Who gets a loan or a mortgage? Which prisoners get considered for parole? Which categories of fake news appear in your news feed? What price does Ryanair quote you for that particular flight? Why has your credit rating suddenly and inexplicably worsened?

In many cases, it may be that these decisions are rational and/or defensible. The trouble is that we have no way of knowing. And yet the black boxes that yield such outcomes are not inscrutable to everyone just to those who are affected by them. They are perfectly intelligible to the corporations that created and operate them. This means that the move towards an algorithmically driven society also represents a radical power-shift, away from citizens and consumers and towards a smallish number of powerful, pathologically secretive technology companies, whose governing philosophy seems to be that they should know everything about us, but that we should know as little as possible about their operations.

Whats even more remarkable is that these corporations are now among the worlds largest and most valuable enterprises. Yet, on the whole, they dont receive the critical scrutiny their global importance warrants. On the contrary, they get an easier ride from the media than comparable companies in other industries. If the CEO of an oil company, a car manufacturer or a mining corporation were to declare, for example, that his motto was Dont Be Evil, even the most somnolent journalist might raise a sceptical eyebrow. But when some designer-stubbled CEO in a hoodie proclaims his belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, the media yawn tolerantly and omit to notice his companys marked talent for tax avoidance. This has to stop: transparency is a two-way process.

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