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A Big Problem With AI: Even Its Creators Can't Explain How It Works (technologyreview.com)
Last year an experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors. The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions, argues an article on MIT Technology Review. From the article: The mysterious mind of this vehicle points to a looming issue with artificial intelligence. The car's underlying AI technology, known as deep learning, has proved very powerful at solving problems in recent years, and it has been widely deployed for tasks like image captioning, voice recognition, and language translation. There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries. But this won't happen -- or shouldn't happen -- unless we find ways of making techniques like deep learning more understandable to their creators and accountable to their users. Otherwise it will be hard to predict when failures might occur -- and it's inevitable they will. That's one reason Nvidia's car is still experimental.
I've tried to learn some AI techniques, but I run into the following issues: 1. I never took linear algebra in school.
2. I never took advanced statistics in school
3. Everything I have read on the topic of AI requires a fluent knowledge of 1 and 2. I know basic statistics, I can do differential equations (with some difficulty). However, you have to completely think in terms of linear algebra and advanced statistics to have a basic understanding of what's going on. Very few people are taught those subjects.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
This.
Automation doesn't know what the fuck it's doing.
I was working on a unit at Texaco and it was a shutdown.
No hydrocarbons are allowed on the unit while it's down and workers are crawling all over it.
Against regulations, a 10" pipe full of propane terminated 12' into the perimeter and was flanged with a rusty blind.
We were 6 days into the 30-day shutdown when the blind ruptured.
The pressure meter on the line said, "Oh, shit! Loss of pressure! Spin up the pump! Crap!. Pressure not responding, pump MORE!"
Killed 8 people.
That, in a nutshell, is AI.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yea, the last president was so great he got chemical weapons out of Syria.
He did prevent them using Chemical Weapons... whilst he was president. Which was his goal.
Then Trump came along and said he wasn't going to intervene in any military action in Syria. They saw it as a green light to do despicable things and Trump had to respond militarily to stop them.
If Trump wasn't President, and if he hadn't said he was going to be soft on Syria, the chemical attack probably would never have happened.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch