The interest in black-box models is partly for the reasons given, that it is presumed that their inexplanability makes them more powerful, but also because business people are sick of dealing with programmers and analysts as a class, people with arcane knowledge limited replacability, and a penchant for blowing deadlines.
The dream of machine learning is to fire the programmer and break up the last trade (baring doctors and lawyers).
If it was just business people being alienated, I'd say fuck it they deserve it. But the fact is everyone, and many of the programmers too, are alienated too when much of the code makes sense to no one. I would rather fix programming to be comprehensible to more people even though it will take down the walls between programmer and non-programmer.
The dream of machine learning is to fire the programmer and break up the last trade (baring doctors and lawyers).
If it was just business people being alienated, I'd say fuck it they deserve it. But the fact is everyone, and many of the programmers too, are alienated too when much of the code makes sense to no one. I would rather fix programming to be comprehensible to more people even though it will take down the walls between programmer and non-programmer.