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Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

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Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#191

Post by zmgsabst »

diputsmonro wrote: post #123
zmgsabst wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your deflection about the media is entirely unrelated to AI, but it only backs up my argument. If giant media corporations are biased, why can't AI researchers be? Every institution has biases, and blindly trusting a dataset from e.g. a police department is just as bad as blindly trusting data from CNN or Fox News. The collection, aggregation, and sharing of data is a biased operation. If a political or for-profit en…

I don’t think it’s unrelated:

I often see that argument made in bad faith, eg when someone who believes conclusions from biased data encounters AIs making data driven conclusions, more than I do when the AI is genuinely biased.

I also have trouble taking it seriously, since that same standard isn’t applied to existing information services (eg, “media ethics” posts condemning their open racism) — only to new information services which might disrupt the current social order.

I should have stated that more directly — but I view these concerns largely as after the fact ethical nits from people whose comfortable myths are confronted by data, projecting their own manipulative behavior onto others.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#192

Post by namaria »

outworlder wrote: post #170
magic_hamster wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm completely stunned that people will compromise safety to avoid taking a few steps. The idea of filling my home network with iffy iot devices and having a single point of failure for things like lighting my home and unlocking my doors is absolutely crazy to me. Not to mention all the meta data these devices might leak about my routine and whereabouts. I have no idea why people think these are reasonable trade-offs. Maybe I'm crazy.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#193

Post by mdp2021 »

NateEag wrote: post #184
belval wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's the hill I'll die on, but these "white vs black" and "master slave" are inherently racist just make my head turn every time. blacklist came from BEFORE slavery in America. > According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word "blacklist" originated with a list England's King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in…

I think the concern is not that the word _is_ racist in origin, but that people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by racism and slavery may _perceive_ them as such. An idea doesn't have to be true to cause someone suffering.

While of course one will do every reasonable attempt not to offend another part gratuitously, and also noting that the problem of misperception should call for a correction in the perception itself (and more contextually, if "«alter[ation]»" has been caused there should be investments in treatments), if you allowed events to affect innocent structures you would arrive at absurdities such as "avoid that formerly common gesture because it is now the signature of controversial group G". Which would also be a form of foolish treason, empowering that contemptible part - they have now modified your culture - that should have instead been relegated in its narrow place.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#194

Post by mdp2021 »

ivoras wrote: post #109

The armchair philosopher in me really wants to draw a parallel to a loose interpretation of Godel's incompleteness theorem to conclude that there's nothing which indicates we should be able to understand even us, let alone emergent phenomena we provoke.

> The armchair philosopher in me

I hope that the armchair pragmatist in you would react, when told "I would not trust your wife", by asking for more information.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#195

Post by belval »

NateEag wrote: post #184
belval wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's the hill I'll die on, but these "white vs black" and "master slave" are inherently racist just make my head turn every time. blacklist came from BEFORE slavery in America. > According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word "blacklist" originated with a list England's King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in…

I think the concern is not that the word _is_ racist in origin, but that people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by racism and slavery may _perceive_ them as such. An idea doesn't have to be true to cause someone suffering.

A society cannot exist if any perceived slight and irrational thoughts are cause for change. Otherwise where is the line drawn? Do black coffee, black sabbath, yin and yang need to change as well? Maybe we can replace the word "black" with "dark", that way we truly have a departure from words that can be _perceived_ as offensive.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#196

Post by whiddershins »

mdp2021 wrote: post #87

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 c…

Black box was actually a literal non-reflective black box inside an airplane that housed secret tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#:~:text=The%20....

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#197

Post by rifty »

I do not think there is always going to be a practical accompanying strategy for all things weighted impressions can return results for.

‘Intuition’ at times being extremely more practical isn’t a problem to me. But perhaps this is a weird concept for some people who see themselves fundamentally as a machine of reason; that the concept of intuition is simply a result of ignorance rather than a alternative viable method of process…

The important thing to me is that it is predictable, just like universal phenomena we cannot not explain where it comes from, yet can prove through repeated experiment to be a law; or moldable to command like with the behaviour of a paint brush we learn to master with our hand.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#198

Post by p0pcult »

zmgsabst wrote: post #189
gcanyon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Will FBI crime statistics do? > In 2019, race was reported for 6,406 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders: > 52.5 percent were White. > 23.9 percent were Black or African American. https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders White people don’t commit disproportionately many hate crimes — black people do. According to the FBI.

You failed to show evidence that the media is claiming that white people disproportionately commit hate crime.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#199

Post by Arrath »

namaria wrote: post #192
outworlder wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm completely stunned that people will compromise safety to avoid taking a few steps. The idea of filling my home network with iffy iot devices and having a single point of failure for things like lighting my home and unlocking my doors is absolutely crazy to me. Not to mention all the meta data these devices might leak about my routine and whereabouts. I have no idea why people think these are reasonable trade-offs…

I'm both with you and understanding the other side.

Decades of watching Star Trek have filled me with the urge to be able to say "Home, prepare for away team departure." or something less eye-roll worthy for my girlfriend, to do as the GP says and close curtains, turn off lights, set heat lower, etc as I leave.

But, as you point out, the state of security for IoT devices, the specter of surveillance and monitoring, all that keeps me from committing to such sheer nerdery.

Re: Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works

#200

Post by p0pcult »

shadowgovt wrote: post #130
fallingknife wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people want is for the models to show no differences between certain groups of people. That is the standard they use for "no bias." But that itself is bias, so really they just want the model output to conform to their bias that there isn't any difference.

Correct. As a tool serving humans, we want the tool to reflect the decisions humans should make given the same broad swath of data. "Unbiased machine learning models" is basically a nonsense idea; a machine learning engine is a discrimination / classification tool, and its entire point is to become biased based on inputs so that on future inputs, its outputs tilt over in a desired fashion instead of just being uncorr…

You are conflating the statistical meaning of bias with a social meaning of bias.

A statistically unbiased model would be (for example) in which it has the same false positive rate at identifying humans from image data, for varying races, or a model that is equally likely to underpredict as overpredict tomorrow's gas price. These are not nonsense ideas, in fact, they are often good ideas. There are cases, however, where we may want a model to be statistically biased, for example, if the detriment of underpredicting tomorrow's gas price is worse than that of overpredicting it. If the gas price is lower than I expected, maybe it's not so bad that I didn't buy it today.

We (well, some of us) also don't want socially/politically biased models. Examples of those are very devious: redlining, for example, prevented black Americans from equal access to housing, historically, and has caused multiple generations of wealth disparity as a result.

You are using really loose and sloppy language in your talking about ML; you should be using "trained" and not "biased" because bias has a technical meaning that seems to evade you.

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