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AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#21

Post by benrbray »

bobthechef wrote: post #12
tharne wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…

> A journalist's job is to sell newspapers, or clicks, not to keep anyone informed. Yes. And to propagandize on behalf of his and his organization's preferred political views. Seldom do they probably consciously realize they are doing this. The echo chamber synergizes with their prejudices and steers them in that direction. And for them, it's a job. Their reward is the editor's approval, or at least the absence of hi…

There's a Noam Chomsky quote for this:

    “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9692159-i-m-sure-you-believ... [2] "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#22

Post by pjc50 »

Valmar wrote: post #13
blamestross wrote: post #5

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

This seems illogical. This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual, and how different human individuals react differently to the same things depending on their pre-existing understandings of their worlds. So this statement cannot be true.

> This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual

The individual is the brain-in-a-body? There isn't a claim that all brains are identical.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#23

Post by taeric »

rbanffy wrote: post #10

As the tragic ED-209 incident showed us, inadequate training datasets can have deadly consequences. The machine never saw a nicely dressed white man holding a gun and couldn't figure out the gun was dropped.

This took me longer to place than I'd have expected. Kudos!

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#24

Post by bobthechef »

The article makes some acceptable points, but this article seems disorganized and there seems to be a disconnect between the content and the conclusion. The author devotes most of the article to supporting the idea that anthropomorphizing "AI" is a category mistake. But at the end of the article, he claims that this category mistake needs to be taken into account by producers of AI?

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#25

Post by the_af »

huetius wrote: post #17
blamestross wrote: post #5

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.

Peter Watts is an author of fiction and "Blindsight" is a scifi novel, so you better not take it as true!

That said, it's consistent that both the statement could be deceptive (in the sense it describes) but still assert something that could generally be true. It could even be deceptive in tone or some details, but the gist of what it says still be true.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#26

Post by ijcaatst »

huetius wrote: post #17
blamestross wrote: post #5

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.

Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning:

1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness

2. The brain is designed to promote fitness

3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true

You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradiction to 3.

Now he takes the conclusion a bit further and argues that not only may we hold untrue beliefs but that with time we will hold a substantial number of untrue beliefs. He does not justify this in this quote but again, this statement is not contradicted by 3.

Or are you saying that since he argues that the brain lies to us then we can't trust our brains which in turn invalidates any reasoning demonstrated by a brain?

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#27

Post by the_af »

bobthechef wrote: post #9
blamestross wrote: post #5

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?

Aside of what the other commenters replied (in support of the assertion), please bear in mind "Blindsight" is a scifi novel. Peter Watts is not a scientist, he's a writer of fiction. Whether he believes what he wrote in his book is uncertain, but remember this is primarily a work of fiction.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#28

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

tharne wrote: post #6
bottled_poe wrote: post #3

Some interesting ideas, but it’s all conjecture and very little data. I’m sure Dr Kim knows this stuff inside out, but I felt like the content lacked support. Also, there are somewhat contradictory statements. Eg. The point about evolution being equivalent to millions of years of AI training is absurd - In a later sentence, the author states that computers were designed for computation (duh) and so it shouldn’t be a…

> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…

"Journalism" doesn't tend to reward this. It is a tautological statement than faster is better, all else being equal, for any type of work.

In this case, the article is by a guest author. They are not a journalist and this isn't, technically, "journalism".

"Journalism" also isn't monolithic enough to warrant the accusation that the trade itself is lowering its standards across-the-board. There are plenty of examples of deeply researched stories or elaborately crafted features on anything from pop culture to science to politics. While some publications may have succumbed to the easy fix that is viral content, and many local papers are but a shade of their former glory because nobody cares, the are plenty of publishers who escaped the other way, to quality.

Your complaint about selective quoting also really isn't really about anything being rushed. I presume you could lock the author in a dungeon for a few hours and they might be willing to say whatever you want, but not because they suddenly agree with it.

If you disagree with the author and work in AI, I would suggest that it isn't entirely impossible that the topic of cognitive biases is relevant here in more than one way.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#29

Post by IAmEveryone »

bottled_poe wrote: post #3

Some interesting ideas, but it’s all conjecture and very little data. I’m sure Dr Kim knows this stuff inside out, but I felt like the content lacked support. Also, there are somewhat contradictory statements. Eg. The point about evolution being equivalent to millions of years of AI training is absurd - In a later sentence, the author states that computers were designed for computation (duh) and so it shouldn’t be a…

I don't know what sort of "data" you might want. There are modes of argumentation that do not rely on double-blind randomised trials.

The argument is, essentially:

- people used to believe that being a chess grandmaster is universally considered proof of high intelligence

- people also believed that opening a refrigerator requires strictly less intelligence than becoming a chess grandmaster

- we now have build artificial "intelligence" that easily beats any human in chess. Ask it to open a refrigerator and see what happens.

-> Therefore, our concept of "intelligence", as a single, ordered, continuous, and measurable quantity, is demonstrably wrong.

You can proof plenty with a single datapoint or two. As long as you don't care about the color, half a sheep proofs sheep exist. There's no n and no p-value attached to that because it is not subject to measuring errors and confounders. Sheep just is.

They article isn't quite clear on how our biases are potentially dangerous, because it happens to be the point of warnings to come before the actual damage occurs. But when someone is setting out to revolutionise all our lives with something that uses the term "intelligence", and neither they nor we can actually come up with definition of the concept, maybe the burden of proof should be on those saying it's all fine, and not those asking for a bit of occasional reflection.

I also just don't get what's controversial about the article. It doesn't even ask for anything dramatic, or specific. It's the MIT robot tech leader, who knows what they're talking about. And when people start invoking the human rights of abused robots, I am confident the robotics community wouldn't object to that being either a joke or misguided anthropomorphising.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#30

Post by scotty79 »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #18
scotty79 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.

And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.

Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.
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