technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected cars airplanes medical devices financial transactions and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before making them seem both harder to understand and in some cases harder to control government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence and therefore involves less humantohuman contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical political and economic questions regarding humannatural relations additionally the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control the study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the internet of things explainable has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong