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We do understand how it works most of the time, but can't predict if certain changes will be beneficial or detrimental. After the fact it's pretty clear what e.
by m0zg 8y ago
We do understand how it works most of the time, but can't predict if certain changes will be beneficial or detrimental. After the fact it's pretty clear what e.g. CNNs do (find manifold transforms which, coupled with nonlinearities minimize error in the layer-wise output distributions when backpropagating loss of the minibatches of the training set). But you can't reliably say "if I add e.g. a bottleneck branch over here my accuracy will go up/down X%".
Fundamentally we have to contend with the fact that human ability to understand complex systems is fairly limited, and at some point it will become an impediment to further progress. Arguably in a number of fields we're past that point already.
- oldgradstudent 8y agoThat's all very cool. But for safety critical systems you have to understand how these systems work to understand their limitations. You have to know when these techniques succeed, when they fail, and how badly they fail.
- m0zg 8y agoDo you feel like you understand human limitations in these critical systems? Are humans suitable? Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans?
- oldgradstudent 8y ago> Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans? In general yes, but it might depend on the pattern of failure - if your self-driving cars hunts me or my family personally, I might have problem with that. But how can you determine that without releasing it to the wild and waiting for bodies? Worse, say you have a safe system, but you need to modify the network (to fix some bug). How can you determine that the new system is safe enough to put on the road?
- m0zg 8y agoBut any technology can be deadly if you deploy it widely enough. _WhatsApp_ has resulted in "bodies" and it doesn't have any AI in it at all. First airplanes were basically flying coffins. Cars until early 90s had very little chance of survival in collision above 40mph. Many drugs have serious, sometimes deadly side effects. Quarter of a million people die in hospitals in US alone every year due to medical errors. 100% of those errors are currently made by humans. It's remarkable that AI seems to be held to an arbitrarily high standard, often exceeding that of other technologies.
- perl4ever 8y ago"Quarter of a million people die in hospitals in US alone every year due to medical errors. 100% of those errors are currently made by humans." Well, that's an odd thing to say. I guess you can say that, for instance, the Therac-25 episodes involved human error, but in that case, any problems with AI are also due to human error. If everything is due to human error, then there is no alternative to defend. Medical errors certainly do involve the interface between humans and computers, and it isn't really plausible that either humans or computers can be eliminated from medicine.
- gshrikant 8y agoRightfully so. Part of the problem is the way that we speak about the technology - calling it 'artificial intelligence' when the underlying technology does not resemble true intelligence at all. This raises expectations and lets people use AI as a dumping ground for infeasible ideas.
- m0zg 8y agoBut my point is, even the "real" intelligence isn't so hot in a lot of cases, and AI could surpass it in terms of outcomes on narrow tasks.
- bumby 8y agoMy guess is that most people feel AI should be held to a higher standard is because we feel the need to be able to audit the system in the case of mishaps. When ML becomes a high-level black box, we may not have the confidence in how to right that ship if it goes astray. With human errors, if we're (hopefully) empathetic creatures we at least have the hope of understanding the root of the error.