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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.

27 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Paging Susan Calvin! Paging Susan Calvin! by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Funny

    Please come to this thread and explain the need for Robopsychology!

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    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
  2. Suddenly a sofa. by queazocotal · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://rocknrollnerd.github.io... - I recommend.

    It's really hard to predict what the deep learning is in fact learning. It may be often useful over the training, this very much does not mean that it's going to do the expected when faced with the unexpected, and not for example decide that it should go over an intersection because the person next to it is wearing a green hat that looks more like a green light than the red light looks like a red light.

  3. Just like a dog or a person by Gilgaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cognitive capability developed by an evolutionary algorithm is going to get fuzzy. Maybe you could have a failsafe dumb AI that can tap the brakes.

    1. Re:Just like a dog or a person by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Well, actually it is. The weights on the "synapses" evolve under feedback. It's not the style of programming normally called "evolutionary programming", but it still works by evolution.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  4. Re:Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by Luthair · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Its marketing bullshit by people trying to push the idea that current technology is AI, it isn't.

    My question is, why are MIT Technology Review articles that show up on Slashdot always so technologically stupid?

  5. I find your lack of faith disturbing... by sinij · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I just don't have any faith in a system that is not fully understood. Just like back in college, you would create some cludge code without proper understanding of underlying concepts and sometimes it would work. However, this would never produce a robust system.

    The same idea applies here.

    1. Re:I find your lack of faith disturbing... by meta-monkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I just don't have any faith in a system that is not fully understood.

      But intelligence and consciousness are not fully understood, and may not even be understandable. And I say that not to invoke some kind of mysticism, but because our decision making processes are lots of overlapping heuristics that are selected by yet other fuzzy heuristics. We have this expectation from sci-fi that a general purpose AI is going to be just like us except way faster and always right, but an awful lot of our intelligent behavior relies on making the best guess at the time with incomplete information. Rustling in bushes -> maybe a tiger -> run -> oh it was just a rabbit. Heuristics work until they don't.

      It may be that an AI must be fallible, because to err is (to think like a) human. But forgiveness only extends to humans. When the human account representative at your bank mishears you you politely repeat yourself. When the automated system mishears you you curse all machines and demand to speak to a "real person." The real person may not be much better but it doesn't make you as angry when they mishear you. With automobile pilots we tolerate faulty humans whose decision-making processes we absolutely don't understand such that car crashes don't even make the news, but every car AI pilot fender bender will "raise deep questions about the suitability of robots to drive cars."

      --
      We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    2. Re:I find your lack of faith disturbing... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      And yet we let people drive. And diagnose cancer.

  6. The Baysian statistics methods by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    that have been around since the 18th century. The problem solutions formulated using it have been misleadingly hyped as AI. Be deceived if your wish.

  7. I'll tell you what's experimental: by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll tell you what's experimental: msmash's use of "English" - two blatant fuckups in the first goddamn sentence.

  8. How does brain work? by lpq · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How do humans work? Not knowing how genius humans arrive at their conclusions doesn't seem to be a huge stumbling block for society to use their output.

    How many scientists really know how "creativity" works?

    1. Re:How does brain work? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      We have no idea yet how human sentience works, therefore it is impossible to emulate it with machinery

      You are merely repeating the same bullshit, without adding any argument.

      What if I study the brain, and make a complete functional copy of all the little details, without understanding what it actually does on a higher level. The copy behaves exactly the same. Mission accomplished.

      Or, I make a genetic programming environment, and let algorithms evolve until they've reached sentience. Just like humans evolved. Mission accomplished.

    2. Re:How does brain work? by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can copy a Windows install disk, and create a working copy without understanding how it works.

      Understanding is not necessarily a requirement for producing a working copy.

      If they could they'd do that already.

      One problem with that approach is that human brain is simply too big for our current hardware.

  9. I've Tried To Learn... by Thelasko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    1. Re:I've Tried To Learn... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      "Anomaly Detection" is still fairly vague, and a large number of techniques could be used, depending on the details. In the worst case, statistics is just a semester long class in college, and so is linear algebra. If you apply yourself, then within four months you could be quite good at both of those topics.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:I've Tried To Learn... by HiThere · · Score: 2

      The statistical and neural network approaches to AI use crushing amounts of computation. Other approaches use less, but don't scale as well to more complicated problems.

      Whatever your approach you will need a very good computer, but with the statistical or neural net approach you will be restricted to toy problems unless you invest heavily in a fancy multiprocessing computer system. Possibly several of them. And that gets expensive.

      If you want to learn AI, read the literature, build the examples, and then decide what you want to do. You can learn neural nets with toy problems, but to do much more you're likely to need financial backing. Deep learning is the current "best approach", but it's not the first one, and it may not be the last one. Evolutionary programming in its various forms has a lot going for it.

      Identify your purpose. Why do you want to learn AI? What do you hope to accomplish? Perhaps you should study linear algebra after all. Perhaps you should invent your own approach. Select a target problem, and figure out how it should be addressed. AI is a wide subject, and the currently most popular approach won't be the best approach for all problems.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  10. Bullshit. by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Script kiddies using somebody else's black box cannot explain how these systems work. These are self proclaimed experts and are certainly not really experts or creators of good code.

    Today's well designed neural networks and other machine learning systems can certainly be fully understood and debugged.

    --
    Greed is the root of all evil.
  11. Re:Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by jdunn14 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Based on this statement I'm guessing you've never worked with statistically based machine learning. Take a "simple" artificial neural network trained to do classification. The person who wrote the algorithm knows how samples from the training set are presented to the network, i.e. what features hit the first layer. The author also knows how data propagates through the network (i.e. a value is propagated to the next layer along the edges connected to a previous layer's node) and even how the weighting on different edges connecting the nodes are updated based on classification failures.

    Once that network is trained it may spit out correct answers time and time again, but the author who knows the algorithms inside and out doesn't know exactly how the network decides that it's looking at a lunar crater and not a volcano. Not knowing those details means that it is incredibly hard to define how the trained AI will fail when faced with an unexpected input.

    There's the problem: if you have a trained AI and not some sort of expert system based on a collection of human knowledge it's nearly impossible to say how it will handle the unexpected near-garbage input.

  12. Bad thought process by Baron_Yam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >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.

    While I care about understanding the system so it can be improved (hopefully before a problem occurs), ultimately all that matters is that it produces statistically better results than a human.

    If a machine kills someone (and we don't even know why) 1% of the time, but a human doing the same job would mess up and kill 3% of people (but we'd understand why)... I'll take ignorance.

    1. Re:Bad thought process by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      If a machine kills someone (and we don't even know why) 1% of the time, but a human doing the same job would mess up and kill 3% of people (but we'd understand why)... I'll take ignorance.

      A couple problems with this argument:

      (1) Is the 1% part of the 3% that would likely have been killed by the human, or is the 1% a novel subset? If you yourself were part of that 1% that is now more likely to be killed, you might care about this choice.

      (2) Unpredictable failures often mean that you can't ever get good stats like you have there until you actually deploy a system. Which means you're basically taking a leap of faith that the system will only kill 1% and not 5% or 20% when put into practice.

      This is one of my concerns with self-driving cars. A lot of the miles they've been tested on so far have been on known roads with good (or reasonably good) conditions. Aside from situations where the "driver" actively disengages the AI because of a specific situation, we know that Google's fleet (for example) is driven a lot of miles manually. The Google safety reports only contain information on when the system is deliberately disengaged, but we don't get reports on when drivers decide just to drive the car manually for whatever reason instead (maybe it's a bad weather day, maybe they'll be driving through an area with new construction or some other random hazard the system hasn't been tested on yet, etc.).

      Roads can have lots of random unpredictable hazards that are rare but which humans have to respond to, from altered routes for construction to inadequate signage around construction zones, police directing traffic, traffic lights malfunctioning, pedestrians doing unexpected things, children or animals running into the road, debris on the road, combinations of weather phenomena with any or all of the above, etc., etc.

      As humans, we just handle all these "edge cases" in stride when driving, even if every one of them has a very low statistical probability of happening. But how will an AI algorithm perform in every permutation of these issues?

      I have no doubt that current self-driving algorithms will ALREADY be safer than most human drivers on a clear, well-marked, well-mapped highway with no unexpected hazards. I have no doubt that current self-driving algorithms are probably already better suited to driving in heavy traffic and would be more safe than humans in not tailgating or cutting others off, choosing better optimal speeds, etc.

      So, it's likely that we'd be able to reduce a lot of COMMON causes of accidents by adopting self-driving cars even today. The question is how they'll handle the edge cases, and how common those edge cases might even be. Without understanding the way the AI makes its decisions, it might be seriously underequipped to handle even many obvious scenarios -- but this might not become apparent until full-scale testing, perhaps resulting in significant danger.

      For years now, I've been worried about the "nightmare scenario" of an AI car doing something that might even objectively seen as reasonable (and perhaps not even reasonably preventable by a human driver) but which resulted in several deaths of kids or something. At that point, all the stats about 3% vs. 1% or whatever will stop mattering; it will just be the "evil robot car that killed kids" in every news headline, which could set back self-driving car progress by a decade.

      Now imagine the same scenario where the AI's decision doesn't even seem to make objective sense, because we can't understand the logic of the algorithm in that case! That would be a true PR disaster for AI in general.

      While you may be willing to take the morbid actuarial calculations at face value, I think there's a real danger to public perception and potential regulation (and its impact on progress) if we can't explain the risks adequately.

  13. Parents by multi+io · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are people (commonly called "parents") who have created one or more natural intelligences and can't explain how those work either. Nobody seems to care too much.

  14. Re:Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by sexconker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Uh, it's simple. Freeze it (disable the feedback loop that lets it modify itself) and test in on a bunch of new data, a bunch of garbage data, etc., and watch it.
    If you want to methodically define its behavior you just need to look at the damn thing. Getting any useful info out of that will be an issue though. You may find out that somewhere deep in your neural net it's looking for a seemingly random pattern of contrast or checking against some strange distance/angle. Without tracing its entire training history you won't know why. But you can see that it's checking for that shit and then test it by giving it data that varies a lot on the things it checks, and try to suss out what impact that has in real-world use. No, it's not easy. But it's absolutely knowable and testable.

  15. Re:The same can be said for human learners. by jdunn14 · · Score: 2

    I completely agree that simulation and training are the solution and that the bar to beat humans at driving is pretty low. That doesn't make it any less of a nasty task to figure out WTF the neural net is actually basing decisions on or make it any more understandable to the programmer who wrote it. I'd gladly give up my vehicle for a well tested self driving car. I'd still like the option to drive sometimes, but the normal day-to-day is just a dangerous waste of time.

  16. Re:Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by jdunn14 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Uh, it's simple .... No, it's not easy. But it's absolutely knowable and testable.

    I agree that it's completely doable, but the poster I replied to was stating that the programmer who wrote the algorithm must understand how it's making decisions and that only the less skilled maintenance coders would be confused. That's simply not true. I know people who could write a neural net from a reasonable spec but doing the steps you described above would blow their minds. I'd also argue that a NN with even a few layers of nodes can get complex fast enough that what you're proposing would result in a document the size of a novel and still not capture all the nuances.

    I really appreciate your point that

    Getting any useful info out of that will be an issue though. You may find out that somewhere deep in your neural net it's looking for a seemingly random pattern of contrast or checking against some strange distance/angle.

    If the net is using some seemingly random pattern that's where you can get some bizarre (to human thinking) failures. We tend to understand when something goes wrong in a way we can comprehend. If the seemingly random pattern the computer finds happens to call a slightly obscured "stop sign" a "no u-turn" sign that would be incomprehensible to a human, but might make perfect sense to the NN.

    This all isn't to say that you can't reduce the odds of this sort of problem to such a small number that it's meaningless especially in comparison to human error. Still, when crap like this happens it makes the news and gets blown all out of proportion, so expect "the sky is falling" stories to follow any uncertainty AI behavior.

  17. Re:I can explain by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3

    When an AI can explain how AI works, then maybe I'll believe that it's an AI. Until then ...

    Since a human brain can't explain how a brain works, that seems like a silly criteria.

  18. Re: Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by smugfunt · · Score: 2

    According to this Obama dropped over 12,000 bombs on Syria last year.

  19. Re:Okay, but someone wrote the algorithm by david-bo · · Score: 2

    There has been around 60 documented attacks with chemical weapons by the Syrian government since the war begun. Most of them after Obama "got rid of Syria's chemical weapons".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Check your facts.