Public Understanding of Machine Learning

"I understand we understand one another" is a great line from the Philadelphia Story - one fab film (also made as a great musical).

So machines start to understand us, at least statistically, programmes create models that may or may not have predictive value about our behaviour (film viewing, travel preferences, dating, etc etc).

But do we understand the machines (or do we, as Pat Cadigan said in the prescient novel Synners, need to "change for the machines"? (including 50 pence bits, as she implied :-)

David Spiegalhalter has spent a lot of time working out how to convey Uncertainty to the non-technical person. Now we have a more complex task

not just mean, variance, confidence limits etc, but also

principle components
linear regression
k-means
bayes
random forest
variational approaches
convolutional neural networks
GANs

etc etc

What hope have we for this? What fear do we have of that? All is blish, all is blush, all is plash.