Is this true or is it more a case that journalists increasingly can’t understand scientists?
Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
161–170 of 231 posts
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#162Who 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 ph…
> "Siri turn off lights in the living room"
No snark here : why don't you make a few steps and switch them off manually ? Saving these few steps doesn't make sense to me. You need to walk to be healthy.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#163Who 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 ph…
> 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 can't comment much on Siri or Alexa, but Google Assistant has gotten heaps better at understanding my voice and intent since it was first released about 6 years ago. It used to pretty reliably misunderstand at least 1 word per sentence (which made for an extremely frustrating ex…
Siri's total impotence was one of the most surprising issues when I switched from stock Android to iPhone a couple years ago. I'm curious what's going on inside Apple to produce something this poor in their core product.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting aside the rudeness, you basically just agreed with the parent. They said people don't want an AI with no bias, we want an AI that mirrors own biases. Your example of loans is perfectly in line with this: we have a social bias against racism and racial profiling, and we want our AIs to reflect that bias. Purely on the question of risk assessment, race must meaningfully impact a loan risk or the AI wouldn't dev…
I think people are conflating the technical sense of "bias" to the social sense. Technically, a biased model is one that overfits the training data and has poor generalisation. Ethically, a biased model would be one that reinforces discrimination.
I agree the parent poster was using the ethical/social sense of "bias" in calling a discriminatory loan risk AI biased, but I don't think it's overfitted and so I don't think this is what the original poster meant.
In the loan example, the objective is to assess risk. Assuming the data we feed it draws equally from all races, the AI will still almost certainly infer a racial component to loan risk. This is not a statistical or systematic error, this is an accurate assessment of society due to long-standing racial inequalities.
I think the original poster meant that ethics is not an objective science, and so our preference for certain ethical reasoning is itself a bias. "Correcting" the "biased" outcomes we don't like that are apparent in the data, and that are a reflection of society at large, involves biasing the training data.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#165Who 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 ph…
> "Siri turn off lights in the living room" No snark here : why don't you make a few steps and switch them off manually ? Saving these few steps doesn't make sense to me. You need to walk to be healthy.
"Siri turn off all the lights" is a hell of a lot easier than going up and down the stairs to every room in my house to make sure I turned off all lights before going to bed.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#166Who 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 ph…
Siri has gotten better in at least one measurable way: since it first came out, I've repeatedly cited this phrase as a problem: "Hey Siri, text this photo to " For years Siri would respond with "I'm sorry, I don't have the ability to send photos." Specifically I would point out that Siri understood what I wanted, it just couldn't do it. Each time there is an OS update, I check that to see if it's been addressed, and I've been disappointed for years.
Recently in a job interview in response to one of those "what's a product you like or don't like and why" questions, I said that I liked Siri, but here's my concrete example of how it needs to improve. I pulled out my phone, said the phrase... and Siri happily texted the photo. I didn't pass the interview :-)
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#167Now do reproducable builds. This is the same complexity problem, but with a bunch of woo as a vehicle for their other agenda items. I could write the same article by saying, "developers increasingly can't explain how software works," and then use the ancient aliens conclusion-from-negative-premise trope to say, "software is everywhere and complex, scientists can't even reproduce it, , could software contain embedded problematic and systemic bads like sexism, racism and homophobia? These legitimate PhD's say they don't know for sure. We asked further simple questions, but they were ignored, could software developers be hiding other problematic things? - ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'"
I'm not saying it's stupid, but I am saying it's as honest and intellectually rigorous as Ancient Aliens.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#168This is good actually. It means that AI is becoming increasingly more like the human brain - also something we cannot explain how it works. Were we under some sort of pretense that AI would be explainable? What's the ancestry of that idea?
Our aspirations for AI once included the assumption that intelligence involved the ability to explain its own thought processes...
Settling for "computer programs with interesting output that don't know how they work but neither do we" seems like a step back. Many things are too complicated for us to parse without remotely approximating intelligence, like next month's weather.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what you're really saying is, it's perfectly okay for AI to have negative preconceptions and concrete impacts to certain groups of people, as long as it agrees with you on which groups are bad. How would you feel about AI models that classify all modern white people as racists based on overwhelming historical data about slavery, the KKK, etc.? Hey man, data doesn't lie.
Isn’t the media doing exactly that? They fixate on white racists while ignoring (eg) the Christmas parade attack — leading to society developing a bias in their beliefs about racism. I always take these criticism of AI as confession-through-projection of the misdeeds people have engaged in already.
I'm gonna need a cite and some statistical analysis to back up your "media is biased" claim. One data point on an event that I easily found reporting on isn't going to cut it.
Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works
#170Who 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 ph…
I must be in the minority but I really dislike voice commands. Every time I try it I feel stupid talking to appliances. But even if I didn't mind talking to lightbulbs and thermostats it would still bother me for several reasons: I don't like being listened to by these corporations, I don't like exposing my electronics to the internet, and I still don't see how any of this stuff is better than flicking a switch.
> I don't like exposing my electronics to the internet, and I still don't see how any of this stuff is better than flicking a switch.
That assumes you are close to the switch, that you have switches for all the things you want to do and that you are even free to operate said switches. I do agree if all you are doing is turning a device on and off, it isn't that helpful(it can still be as it allows you to do something else in the mean time).
However, you can operate multiple devices simultaneously by triggering a routine. A single command can arm your alarm system, turn off the lights across your entire house, close curtains, activate robot vacuums and whatever else you can think of. Could it be a button? Yeah, it could. Is it as convenient? No.
And obviously messing with devices is not all they can do. You can ask questions.
Also, to the security point, at least the Echo devices don't allow amazon to be "listening" to you all the time. They listen for the trigger word, and then they send your query. I know, because my devices are being monitored. If they start uploading data all the time I'll know about it. And I bet I'm not the only one doing that.