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Decisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You c

Decisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You can't blame the hardware. The software doesn't have much meaning before it is trained. That leaves the training data. The data are just facts, so you only have a few routes to find the root cause of a decision: * If a datum is actually false, you can correct it. * Selection of data for the training set * Input order I don't know much about AI. Maybe someone who knows more can explain how to investigate a contentious decision?

strebler 9y ago
I'm no fan of the A.I. hype of today, but I can comment that deep learning actually makes the "contentious decision" easier to detect. With the "old way", i.e. jam some features into an SVM, there was no accountability / confidence. At least I've never seen a reliable SVM-based confidence score. But, for example, confidence scores are actually a byproduct of running a modern CNN for image classification. This is very useful for "finding mistakes" (assuming you have 100% accurate training data, and other prerequisites). It even helps fixing issues in the training data, we use it all the time. That being said, the big dirty secret that nobody's pointing out is: there has been no real "theory-level" advancement in AI in the last 20 years that have borne fruit (at least in computer vision and neural nets). The models are just bigger (and much better) with some slight tweaks (dropout, etc). It's hardware that's made that possible. Academics have done a thorough and wonderful search of the model space and have some great finds. But I think we still need a few solid theoretical leaps before the singularity.
hacker_9 9y ago
Technically it's still the programmer who made all the decisions, at least with the current state of NNs. True decision making is philosophically up there with the 'what is consciousness' problem. When the blame game is played though, the end result would likely be the corporation in question getting sued for a lot of money, who then might choose to take internal action and fire certain employees.
- pps43 9y ago
  In many cases the programmer could not have made the decisions. For example, AlphaGo programmers could not win against top go professionals, but AlphaGo can. With a simple model like credit score it's easy to see which input affects which output in which direction. You're late on your mortgage - your FICO score drops. But this is just one neuron. Make the model a little more complex, and you no longer have a way to know what exactly it is doing.
gens 9y ago
Whoever is using it to make said decisions.

strebler 9y ago

I'm no fan of the A.I. hype of today, but I can comment that deep learning actually makes the "contentious decision" easier to detect. With the "old way", i.e. jam some features into an SVM, there was no accountability / confidence. At least I've never seen a reliable SVM-based confidence score. But, for example, confidence scores are actually a byproduct of running a modern CNN for image classification. This is very useful for "finding mistakes" (assuming you have 100% accurate training data, and other prerequisites). It even helps fixing issues in the training data, we use it all the time. That being said, the big dirty secret that nobody's pointing out is: there has been no real "theory-level" advancement in AI in the last 20 years that have borne fruit (at least in computer vision and neural nets). The models are just bigger (and much better) with some slight tweaks (dropout, etc). It's hardware that's made that possible. Academics have done a thorough and wonderful search of the model space and have some great finds. But I think we still need a few solid theoretical leaps before the singularity.

hacker_9 9y ago

Technically it's still the programmer who made all the decisions, at least with the current state of NNs. True decision making is philosophically up there with the 'what is consciousness' problem. When the blame game is played though, the end result would likely be the corporation in question getting sued for a lot of money, who then might choose to take internal action and fire certain employees.

pps43 9y ago
In many cases the programmer could not have made the decisions. For example, AlphaGo programmers could not win against top go professionals, but AlphaGo can. With a simple model like credit score it's easy to see which input affects which output in which direction. You're late on your mortgage - your FICO score drops. But this is just one neuron. Make the model a little more complex, and you no longer have a way to know what exactly it is doing.

gens 9y ago

Whoever is using it to make said decisions.