https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-deep-dive-into-deep-learning/

On Wednesday, March 27, the 2018 Turing Award in computing was given to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. Deep learning by complex neural networks lies behind the applications that are finally bringing artificial intelligence out of the realm of science fiction into reality. Voice recognition allows you to talk to your robot devices. Image recognition is the key to self-driving cars. But what, exactly, is deep learning?

Dozens of articles tell you that it’s a complex, multilayered neural network. But they don’t really shed much light on deep learning’s seemingly magical powers. For example, to explain how it can recognize faces out of a matrix of pixel values (i.e., an image).