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There is a somewhat widespread implicit assumption that having sufficient intelligence to develop increasingly sophisticated machine learning implies that we al
by Xcelerate 4y ago
There is a somewhat widespread implicit assumption that having sufficient intelligence to develop increasingly sophisticated machine learning implies that we also have sufficient intelligence to develop an “intuitive” understanding of how it works.
I think that assumption is totally wrong, and trying to reconcile the two is probably a distraction and a waste of time.
Evolution led to human intelligence just fine on its own; why are humans not simply the catalyst in the next stage of this natural process from which something more complex arises?
With regard to the moral questions around machine learning, I think people are overthinking things. There needs to be a sharp (societal) line between inferring causation and the capability for prediction. Maximize the latter any way that you can, but a lot of careful thought should be put into how the results of a prediction are utilized. Instead we are currently going about this backward by trying to haphazardly “clean” the input data so that the output gets a free pass on how it can be used. We can never decouple all of the biases and eliminate intra-predictivity in the input data though, so it’s fundamentally a bad approach.
- xg15 4y ago> There is a somewhat widespread implicit assumption that having sufficient intelligence to develop increasingly sophisticated machine learning implies that we also have sufficient intelligence to develop an “intuitive” understanding of how it works. I agree with you on that point, but not with the conclusion that this is in any way a good thing. > Evolution led to human intelligence just fine on its own; why are humans not simply the catalyst in the next stage of this natural process from which something more complex arises? I think I have the complete opposite view here. Why would "being the catalyst in the next stage of evolution" be anything desirable? Evolution has no "stages", it's just chaos and life trying to deal in the best way with the circumstances at hand. If we blew everything up in nuclear armageddon tomorrow and the only remaining life were archaeae, those would be a perfectly fine "next stage of evolution". Similarly, we can build a would in which only robots can survive, but why would we want to? I think, gaining more understanding how the world works is the one thing AI can really bring to the table. If it solves practical problems on the way to that, that's great, but we evidently survived so far pretty well by doing that stuff ourselves.
- fallingknife 4y agoWhat people are really saying, but never will admit, is that they want AI to mirror their own biases, not to have none. That's the reason they are "cleaning" the input data.
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- p0pcult 4y agoI think with this response, you reveal more about yourself and your worldview, than any general truth about others.
- fallingknife 4y agoAnd with yours you reveal that you have no point at all
- joenot443 4y agoWhat exactly is the worldview you're describing here?
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- mchaver 4y agoI always thought it was the opposite. That we want AI to have no biases, but we have trouble avoiding it. Choosing data and cleaning is where we insert our bias.
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- fallingknife 4y agoWhat 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.