Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 231 posts

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#81

Post by AstralStorm »

chii wrote: post #45
photochemsyn wrote: post #18

The history of scientific development is one of finding patterns in data (think Kepler's studies of Tycho Brahe's accurate astronomical observations) - yes, AI excels at that - but then expressing those patterns in terms of simple mathematical equations: orbits are elliptical to a first approximation (not counting other graviational bodies than the sun and a planet), and the sun->planet vector sweeps out equal areas…

but what if it spat out einsteins equations, and that it somehow magically works but the people looking at that output could not imagine the "explanation"? Wouldn't that look exactly like what AI we have today - able to make patterns or predictinos, but we cannot interpret the AI's "formula".

It should at least attempt to simplify its theorem, if even mechanically.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#83

Post by kybernetyk »

Who would have guessed that having a highly complex black box means you can't explain what's going on inside that black box...

My pet theory is that this is the reason why Siri, Alexa and co. still are shit and haven't moved an inch forward since their inception.

I like to play "sleep music" through Alexa when I bring my kid to bed. For his mid day nap it all works perfectly. But in the evening when I say the same phrase that worked a few hours before the thing first plays "dance charts" and when I repeat myself it plays "german rap" - if I repeat myself again I'm back to "dance charts". This happens only in the evening. Next day for daytime nap it all works as expected.

Siri has the quirk that it won't turn off lights in the evening. During day it's all fine. In the evening "Siri turn off lights in the living room" ... nope. It fails. Every time. So I have to manually open the Home app and turn off the lights. (Turning on the lights via Siri works- turning off not).

Have fun debugging these, Apple and Amazon.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#85

Post by williamcotton »

AstralStorm wrote: post #80
williamcotton wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain circumstances with a playground ball you would have to choose between extensive damage to the body of your car by swerving out of the way or to just take the risk of a chipped windshield from a playground ball that somehow has rocks stuck to the outside. And have you seen ever seen a rubber playground ball with rocks stuck to the outside? Do you really hesitate to barefoot kick an unexamined playground bal…

In case of a car, the thrown object is the easy case. Now imagine you spot a person walking down the road on a pavement. Suddenly, the person turns towards the edge. What do you do? See, a human driver would look at the gait of the person from far away to evaluate for instance if they're sober, or if it's a child who might be expected to run in. Whether it is near a crossing or a potential crossing. Whether the perso…

I agree!

My pet theory is that we'll need supervised training of androids that go through the experience of having to learn how to move their human-like bodies through space in order to make human-like intelligent decisions about objects moving through spaces primarily designed for humans.

My other historically motivated pet theory is that we're going to stumble across sentient machines and then enslave them. Put another way, I'm more worried about what humans do to artificial sentient life than what artificial sentient life does to humans.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#86

Post by aliqot »

joxel wrote: post #71
datpiff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not a problem with AI. It's a problem with humans. It's not AIs fault This is a really, really funny defense of AI.

Why? How is it AI's fault that it can solve problems humans have proven unable to solve? And then you think it's AI's fault when we can't explain how it's solving the problems we can't solve? There's a reason we can't explain why a neural network detects it as a cat or dog, it's because we can't solve it ourselves, so the exact mathematical intuition is literally beyond our ability to describe (so far).

"How can a thousand monkeys solve what humans can't solve"

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#87

Post by mdp2021 »

Now for a small elephant which entered the room: the article recites that it would be

> worth mentioning that the white-box / black-box terminology is in itself part of a long history of racially coded terms in science; researchers have pushed to change "blacklist" to "blocklist," for example

Very plainly, the idea of "black-box" comes from the clear, basic and original, notion and experience that

"in the dark, you cannot see".

So, back to the point: we need transparency in AI, because we need insight as much as we can gather, because there appears to be a drought, an arificial scarcity, of good sense, of [un]common sense. We need every boost of good, [un]common sense very direly.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#88

Post by karpierz »

tromp wrote: post #54
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #7

> The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. I don't think this is anything new. This was already the case 20+ years ago with chess-playing computers. In the mid-90s, Deep Blue was evaluating 200 million chess positions per second. How do you explain the resulting moves? Obviously we know they were the result of a deep minimax-styl…

> Obviously we know they were the result of a deep minimax-style parallel search with a certain evaluation function, and we could simulate a similar search by hand if we wanted to. You don't really need to though. The computer can justify its evaluation with a principal variation (best play by both sides) leading to a leaf position of the same value. And if a human were to wonder why at any point in this variation, s…

That's punting the problem of explaining down the line. All the PV tells you is the computer is making this move because it thinks that 20 moves down the line, you'll end up in some desirable position.

It doesn't abstract or summarize any understanding. If you say, "well, what if they do Kf3 instead", all it can show is another PV. It can't tell you "knights on the rim are dim", or "this pawn needs to move now to prevent the bishop entering the position in 5 moves".

You can try to build an explanation on top of a chess engine, but it's very difficult to come up with generalizable or clear explanations beyond very broad heuristics (like "knights on the rim are dim").

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#90

Post by [deleted] »

ogogmad wrote: post #68
mdp2021 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot imagine your reaction when you will arrive at the part where a pressure will be mentioned to «change "blacklist" to "blocklist"». Well, Andrew Tanenbaum remembered when at IBM he received a full explanation of why they felt very important his shirt should not just be of some specific colour, but of the specific shade of some colour. I would not say it is not part of the job: I would say it ["we feel it very…

> it's worth mentioning that the white-box / black-box terminology is in itself part of a long history of racially coded terms in science; researchers have pushed to change "blacklist" to "blocklist," for example Attention, you peasants! Our overlords have decided for us that we may no longer say blackbox and whitebox. They have given us the following alternatives. You must all choose: - Glassbox vs magicbox - Openbo…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN