Some old-school programmers are unsettled by the rise of deep learning. Gathering data, cleaning it up, training models, and experimenting to find what works? This isn’t software engineering as they knew it. This isn’t the mental carpentry they signed up for. “I got into computer science when I was very young, and I loved it because I could disappear in the world of the computer,” Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android phone-operating system who now invests in machine-learning start-ups, told Wired. “It was a clean slate, a blank canvas, and I could create something from scratch. It gave me full control of a world that I played in for many, many years.” The idea that you’re now just tweaking a model, training, and retraining it until it suddenly works, felt—to him—oddly sad.