[jefft255]

They're not even competing with each other. How would you compare an ES to a deep neural network? According to what benchmark? What do you mean by verifiable? Modern success stories with machine learning often deal with problems (NLP, vision, RL) that have little to do with the problems that were being solved by expert systems.

Also, an hypothesis: if (big if) you somehow managed to have an expert system outperform deep learning for vision, I bet that it won't be any more verifiable than a deep neural net is today.

To me the complaint that modern deep learning is unverifiable is a bit dumb, in the sense that any perception algorithm working with low level signals (vision, sound) will not be transparent to a human. 15 years ago, an image classification pipeline looked like: bag of SIFT features + SVM classifier. Try explaining the decision made by that algorithm in an intuitive way!