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Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

nautil.us

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Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#31

Post by tabtab »

Use Factor Tables: https://github.com/RowColz/AI

Dissection and analysis is made more like traditional accounting and statistics so that "ordinary" office workers can analyze why and where they work. Granted, it involves more human tuning and planning than multi-layer neural nets, but that's also part of the upside: regular office workers can "see" why what part or layer does what, and adjust it as needed. And it's easier to split it into tasks or specialties: Conway's Law meets AI.

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#32

Post by tabtab »

taneq wrote: post #10

AI as in rule-learning systems aren't necessarily inscrutable. 'Real AI' will necessarily be so once it reaches a sufficiently high level, purely because we won't be intelligent enough to know whether its rules are right or wrong. The 'right to explanation' idea sounds well-meaning but almost certainly useless. Even humans making decisions are pretty bad at explaining why they made the decisions they did. Sure, they'…

Re: "Even humans making decisions are pretty bad at explaining why they made the decisions they did."

If you want to get anywhere above a low-level employee, you BETTER learn how to explain why you did what you did. It's expected by management, owners, customers, and judges.

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#33

Post by mockingbirdy »

titzer wrote: post #28
mockingbirdy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about AI. I agree that our interconnected world is nearly impossible to thoroughly understand. But that is true for human societies, too. Anthropomorphizing the internet ("If an entity 1000x smarter than you doesn't want you to know it's 1000x smarter than you--or that it even exists!--do you think you stand a chance of figuring it out?") is good to write some sci-fi novels, but in reality most systems…

> If you believe that there might be an entity which exists outside of our perception and has enormous intelligence, it's like a human-made god - a homunculus. It's basically the same as believing in a god. I have nothing against it, but this is entirely hypothetical. I don't really believe in a singular entity in there, other than a convenient abstraction for now. Rather there are many different processes that are a…

> Problem is, the whole damn thing is so complicated that we cannot know anything really definitive about it.

You can say the same things about human societies and nature. Both can be extremely dangerous and all the things you've said about complex computer systems apply to them.

> it's extremely successful at swallowing the world and convincing us to feed it more and more CPU, RAM, disk, data.

because IT (what a pun) adds a lot of value.

> But it will win.

I don't know what you mean by that. It's still a tool, although we give up some control so it can manage a part of our society. Historically, this was a task for the elite (it still is) - a bunch of people who had some privileges. Most give up some control or freedom so that the elite can manage the society. If things went bad, the masses were able to defend themselves most of the time (guillotine and good ol' pitchfork) - Marx talks about this eternal cycle.

I would rather worry about elites that build immense power through technology - today we have tools of mass manipulation and destruction. I don't fear intelligent machines, I fear that humans use those tools to entrench their power. I think this ambiguous fear of technology you're describing is too vague - it sounds more like mild technophobia.

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#34

Post by PAClearner »

ballenf wrote: post #21
MrLeap wrote: post #5

This canard keeps coming up. I've come up with a few explanations. 1) It's to protect the reputation of people who make their living copy/pasting examples from the SK-learn gallery 2) The authors fully understand the tools they're using, but feel there's an element of unexplainable meaning in them that I wager isn't actually there. 3) I'm ignorant and I think this is explainable when I just don't know enough to know…

It's both self-serving and job security to claim that what you do is "beyond human comprehension" or "impossible to know". Also why do we call them "hidden" layers instead of "intermediate" layers? They're no more hidden than any other data in memory, are they?

we call them hidden layers because of path dependence i.e. that is what people called them at first.

the first neural network-like things would have input nodes directly connected to output nodes. Thus both layers were 'exposed' and visible. The hiddden layers are 'hidden' because you don't directly touch them or use them-they are obscured. You can call them intermediate layers if you want I suppose-people will probably understand what you mean

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#35

Post by Ftuuky »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #2

If AI is impervious to explaining itself, then we've created something that we are unable to evaluate, aside from some kind of generic phrase like "The machine is looking at a bunch of stuff, and some of those things are associated with some other things. Sometimes. So it's guessing this is the appropriate action" I'm not going to get into the dystopian nature of that. Too easy. Instead, I have a very practical quest…

Why read cyberpunk books when we're already oppressed by algorithms everyday?

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#36

Post by DanielBMarkham »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #33
titzer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you believe that there might be an entity which exists outside of our perception and has enormous intelligence, it's like a human-made god - a homunculus. It's basically the same as believing in a god. I have nothing against it, but this is entirely hypothetical. I don't really believe in a singular entity in there, other than a convenient abstraction for now. Rather there are many different processes that are a…

> Problem is, the whole damn thing is so complicated that we cannot know anything really definitive about it. You can say the same things about human societies and nature. Both can be extremely dangerous and all the things you've said about complex computer systems apply to them. > it's extremely successful at swallowing the world and convincing us to feed it more and more CPU, RAM, disk, data. because IT (what a pun…

"> Problem is, the whole damn thing is so complicated that we cannot know anything really definitive about it.

You can say the same things about human societies and nature."

You can, but the thing is, we already know a lot about how that works. We've evolved into it over millions of years. We have no idea about this new stuff.

You want to talk about about small groups of 100-150 or so people work together to accomplish something? I've got hundreds of books, stories, history, archaeology. We have the wisdom of the ages. You want to talk about how 20 thousand semi-intelligent agents interact with billions? We have nothing aside from endless optimism and the fun of making stuff. (Doesn't make it bad. It means we should grow the hell up and be a bit reticent about what we're mucking around with. Make smaller mistakes more quickly would be my advice.)

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#37

Post by taneq »

tabtab wrote: post #32
taneq wrote: post #10

AI as in rule-learning systems aren't necessarily inscrutable. 'Real AI' will necessarily be so once it reaches a sufficiently high level, purely because we won't be intelligent enough to know whether its rules are right or wrong. The 'right to explanation' idea sounds well-meaning but almost certainly useless. Even humans making decisions are pretty bad at explaining why they made the decisions they did. Sure, they'…

Re: "Even humans making decisions are pretty bad at explaining why they made the decisions they did." If you want to get anywhere above a low-level employee, you BETTER learn how to explain why you did what you did. It's expected by management, owners, customers, and judges.

Oh, humans are good at coming up with plausible explanations for their choices. Those explanations just aren't always related to the actual process in the humans' heads.

Re: Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? (2016)

#38

Post by tabtab »

taneq wrote: post #37
tabtab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: "Even humans making decisions are pretty bad at explaining why they made the decisions they did." If you want to get anywhere above a low-level employee, you BETTER learn how to explain why you did what you did. It's expected by management, owners, customers, and judges.

Oh, humans are good at coming up with plausible explanations for their choices. Those explanations just aren't always related to the actual process in the humans' heads.

I don't mean "Fido ate my homework", I mean the line of reasoning for choosing or ranking X over Y or Z. If you as a human say a given picture depicts a monkey instead of a squirrel, the user/boss will want to know "why". We expect an answer like "monkeys have big round ears and the picture shows big round ears". We want similar from AI. Maybe it can highlight monkey-esque features in blue and squirrel-esque features in red, along with a color key.
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