Consenting to sharing your personal data with a third party is not a problem that the Internet invented for us: social scientists have been struggling with the issue in their experiments for decades. Macartan Humphreys’s “Reflections on the Ethics of Social Experimentation” that provides a framework within which to consider the consent of populations being studied lists no fewer than eight consent strategies and the ethical considerations that surround them. True to style, the Internet just came along and made things bigger.

With so much public doomsaying over A.I., optimistic views on the matter make for a welcome contribution to a healthier debate on the topic. There is, however, a gap between optimism and unwarranted confidence into which Mr. Pande's recent Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Black Box’ Is Nothing to Fear seems to have fallen.