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For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

economist.com

51–60 of 72 posts

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#51
post #49

I don't think AI needs to be able to explain itself in order to be trusted. Human beings, in general, cannot give arbitrarily deep and valid explanations for their actions, and yet, somehow, we manage to come to trust them.

That's true, but in general humans are concerned about the consequences of their actions and are metacognitive about them, or at the very least can be punished for making the wrong choices, its an iterative corrective process.

How do you apply the same logic to a neural net? It has no comprehension of desirable outcomes, or what its choices actually entail and never can.

There is no way to tell a neural net that a human is not a signpost directly, so it knows in the future no humans are signposts. The only thing you can do is train it on a larger data set and hope it "gets it".

You can tell a human being that a human is not a signpost once, and they can abstract it to all situations.

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#52
post #34

Some people are missing the point. > "In particular, machine minds that cannot explain themselves, or whose detailed operation is beyond the realm of human language, pose a problem for criminal law." It doesn't says that the AI is NOT useful, but that it can't be used for the liability that it creates. > "Dr Datta feeds the system under test a range of input data and examines its output for dodgy, potentially harmful…

Here's another example: an AI, perhaps in a self-driving car, did something that caused harm to people and got the manufacturer hauled into court, and the judge issues a court order to "make it stop doing that." How can the manufacturer comply, if they don't understand why the AI makes that decision, and how to change its decision-making process? This isn't just about accountability, it's also about the manufacturers…

I don't think that that is really the Problem. We also know how to teach people something, without knowing how our Human Brain works. The Problem is Companies can select for certain unlawful behaviour, but nobody can proof that later.

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a self driving car decides to ram into a tree/another car at full speed regularly, im guessing there will be a huge demand for explainability, not just a collective shrug and "I guess we need to train it more dunno lol".

Very much not. Becauae there’s nothing to explain. The software is broken and needs to be fixed, and if the problem is severe and the manufacturer knowingly tries to cover it up, that manufacturer is culpable of negligence. The software has no more agency than a cruise control.

> Becauae there’s nothing to explain. The software is broken and needs to be fixed

The second statement kinda denies the first. If broken software causes a severe or expensive problem, people generally expect an explanation. That is what a post-mortem is generally for.

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much not. Becauae there’s nothing to explain. The software is broken and needs to be fixed, and if the problem is severe and the manufacturer knowingly tries to cover it up, that manufacturer is culpable of negligence. The software has no more agency than a cruise control.

Good luck explaining that to a judge who demands to know why the AI made the decisions that caused an accident, and what exactly the manufacturer is doing to prevent it from happening again.

There are tons of physical processes that aren't explainable. Most current petrochemical plants have inner workings that are only half known, at best. What are we doing about it? Modeling the failure, and engineering a solution that no longer fails in that situation. Unit testing our way to robustness!

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but at least the person bearing the cost is the same that decided to let the AI drive. That doesn't mean what you describe is desirable, but the fall out is rather contained to people who have consented to using the AI. Not so with the examples I listed.

What if the AI drove the car into a pedestrian? The pedestrian didn't consent to letting the AI drive.

What if a drunk drives the car into a pedestrian? Not much content there, either.

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge swathe of problems where AI can provide tons of value, and where most of the benefits and costs of getting it wrong lies with the person deciding to trust the AI in the first place. Your AI self driving car doesn't need to explain itself, it just needs to arrive safely. An AI that merely supports a human decision maker also might not, depending on how its applied. But the AI that might deny your acces…

If a self driving car decides to ram into a tree/another car at full speed regularly, im guessing there will be a huge demand for explainability, not just a collective shrug and "I guess we need to train it more dunno lol".

I think it could be useful to distinguish systems which are required to automatically explain every decision they recommend as a matter of routine, versus systems which are not, but still are required to support post-mortem investigation of serious failures.

Re: For AI to thrive, it must explain itself

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we dont know which ones are spurious and the parent is pretty optimistic about the idea of being able to analyize which ones are/are not.

We only know which ones are spurious if we run the trimming algorithms. I wrote a paper about 10 years ago showing how to use generic algorithms on the weight matrix to remove spurious interactions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2538912/

Genetic algorithms?
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