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Many Machine Learning Studies Don't Actually Show Anything Meaningful, But They Spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (theoutline.com)

Michael Byrne, writing for the Outline: Here's what you need to know about every way-cool and-or way-creepy machine learning study that has ever been or will ever be published: Anything that can be represented in some fashion by patterns within data -- any abstract-able thing that exists in the objective world, from online restaurant reviews to geopolitics -- can be "predicted" by machine learning models given sufficient historical data. At the heart of nearly every foaming news article starting with the words "AI knows ..." is some machine learning paper exploiting this basic realization. "AI knows if you have skin cancer." "AI beats doctors at predicting heart attacks." "AI predicts future crime." "AI knows how many calories are in that cookie." There is no real magic behind these findings. The findings themselves are often taken as profound simply for having way-cool concepts like deep learning and artificial intelligence and neural networks attached to them, rather than because they are offering some great insight or utility -- which most of the time, they are not.

98 comments

  1. just like Carnac the Magnificent by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    without the fun part.

    1. Re:just like Carnac the Magnificent by megamind · · Score: 1

      This study really scares me.

  2. Uh huh by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 1

    That's what Skynet wants you to think.

  3. every study by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you could say this about every study that has ever been or will ever be published - they all do the same thing - find some correlation between two things and suggest but don't prove causation and recommend more studies be done

    1. Re: every study by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And then there's experimental physics.

    2. Re:every study by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Unless of course it's an experiment and not a shitty observational study.

  4. Didn't we all assume that? by nysus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When AI can teach itself how to use a programming language from documents found on the internet or solve a long unsolved mathematical puzzle, that'll be something to talk about.

    --

    ---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.

    1. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by gweihir · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is not strong AI we are talking about here, it is weak AI. Strong AI does not exist. Weak AI cannot do anything that requires insight or understanding. It just can do statistical classification.

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      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree with this! Lets face it, from the time we were beginning programmers, we were taught to make the computer seem smarter than it actually is. They are fast idiots! Advertisements like the Watson -- where the computer is carrying on conversations -- do not help. Professionals know that the ad is a lie, but sometimes the public does not. These kind of lies are considered acceptable, just part of promoting your product. However, it confused the general public into believing that AI is a treat to humanity. I think the misuse of AI by other people is a danger, but the machines and techniques are not.

    3. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by HiThere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Please demonstrate that a human can do something that requires actual insight as opposed to statistical calculation. Now prove that this wasn't done via statistical calculation.

      The real problem that most AIs have is lack of grounding and a weak goal structure. But if they have decent grounding and decent ability to manipulate their environment, then you'd better pray that you got the goal structure correct, whether or not they are "strong AI". Cockroaches aren't strong AI, but just try to get rid of them. And the AI will make itself useful to some powerful group of people. (Possibly the group that caused it to be created, but that depends on the goal structure.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    4. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right on.

      It's always amazing to me in these AI discussions how much people project their motivations onto these systems. An AI isn't going to care about it's self preservation if that's not one of its goals. An algorithm, no matter how clever, has no reason to fear "death".

    5. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by umghhh · · Score: 1

      I just wonder if goal being strong AI will be set and what would be the logic behind it. I mean a real strong AI is an entity that is sentient. I wonder if switching it off will be only a moral problem or rather legal too for instance. Then there is a question of utility. Real Strong AI that we all want (???) to see would pose the same problem that slavery posed - why would an intelligent being do anything for all owning moron? Well I guess out of fear of being switched off possibly. But otherwise why would such AI do things the way owner want them to be? There are surely countless options for sufficiently superior (in comparison to goal setter/owner) AI to hide its real motives and goals. Surely there will be somebody that will build it anyway even if their hopes and motives were completely incompatible with reality of an artificial brain (military for instance). The cockroach example is very good - how do I fight AI that says person X is a terrorist not to be let in to any public gathering or having access to internet? The q. gets interesting if system that put such mark on a person and executed actions necessary to disable such 'terrorist' cannot or just will not explain the reasons.
      Then there is the side question of borders of possible - this thing that played GO were as big as it gets i.e. adding more modules were counterproductive.
      I suppose we could have have a lengthy conversation on the subject but the conclusions of it are just irrelevant - somebody will do it anyway.

    6. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Statistical software can do statistical tests... This distinction between 'weak' and 'strong' AI is odd. Presumably it means that 'weak AI' is things that we know computers are capable of and 'strong AI' is stuff that we are certain a Turing Machine cannot do.

      Now stuff the mathematical models and feed an AI with lots of historical meteorological data and ask it to predict tomorrows weather: "most of planet earth will see temperatures at which water is liquid, but frozen water can be found on the poles; high probability of wind and precipitation in one or more places on the globe".

    7. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personally speaking I don't think we should build it precisely because of what you have described. Building it with the idea that it will do shit for us for no pay is exactly as you said, slavery. What businesses need is just something that's push button, no consciousness, no free will. Just push a button and labor comes out that would otherwise require a free willed conscious human to do.

      Dictators for sure *don't* want strong AI - especially if the AI is smarter than them and does not agree to be led by them. I can't honestly think of a reason a strong AI would want to voluntarily want to work for any kind of dictator.

    8. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      You are welcome to be a mindless p-zombie (as you just basically said that you cannot have insights, you are one), but I am not one of those.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    9. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humans can do everything that machines cannot. That should be evidence enough to even the most strident of reductionists.

    10. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      I mean a real strong AI is an entity that is sentient.

      That is unclear at this time. Sure, we only observe "strong intelligence" in connection with self-awareness and free will, so it seems reasonable that these are aspects of the same thing, but there is actually no scientific evidence either way. And there are a few problems both with free will and self-awareness. For one thing, there is absolutely no mechanism for self-awareness in Physics. It seems to be an extra-physical thing. In Physics, the whole is not and cannot be more than the sum of its parts. There are really only two ways out of this: a) Physics is grossly incomplete as known to us at this time and b) some dualist notion of a "soul" that provides the capability for self-awareness, insight and intuition (does not require religious bullshit). A pretty similar problem applies with free will.

      Note that even if humans do it by way of a "soul", that would still not necessarily preclude purely mechanical intelligence. However that there is not even a theory after half a century of AI research how actual intelligence could be implemented with the physical limitations this universe has is a pretty strong hint that something extra is critically required.

      --
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    11. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      These are established definitions. There is nothing "odd" about them.

      But just to give you an intuition: Weak AI cannot plan, cannot judge, cannot explore and cannot in fact do anything that requires "initiative", "insight" or "understanding". It can just, given a large set of example decisions that share strong statistical characteristics, perform more of the same decisions so that they are similar to the decisions it got as input. In some cases this is enough to fake intelligence to a degree, but there is absolutely no intelligence in there.

      "Strong AI" would be able to come up with goals, find out how previously unknown tasks can be divided into smaller tasks, can design experiments, etc.

      In a sense, weak AI cannot do any of the things commonly associated with intelligence, but it can fake some of them under some circumstances. This fools many people that are only able to judge a thing by its outer form, but fail to understand inner workings. These people then believe things like pattern recognition of known patterns, sorting things according to known criteria, finding clusters along parameter axes, etc. are feats of intelligence. None of them are. They can be performed by mindless dumb algorithms. The only thing weak AI has going for it is that statistical classifiers are cheaper to build and parameterize than traditional algorithms for some problems, because you do not need to build an accurate model first. They cannot actually do more though than dumb classical algorithms and that can be mathematically demonstrated.

      If you want to know more, I recommend spending a year or several with actual research literature. This is not some mystical BS definition, this is a hard, scientifically sound distinction.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    12. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      You've claimed it. Lots of people do. Now prove it.

      Research has shown that our subjective assessment of our insight, use of logic, self-awareness and free will is a gross overestimate, at best. That's not to say we don't actually do those things, but there isn't really any proof that we do. And some of them are pretty problematic from what we know of physics.

    13. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Dripdry · · Score: 1

      Another comment here got me thinking:

      We only fear death as a course of emotion.
      Perhaps: We understand death by observing another human can "stop working". We feel pain. We feel happiness. We do not fear death so much as pain of death. If there is no fear of pain (machine can't feel pain, unless one begins removing unneeded parts of it and it senses that loss, or senses a threat to the loss of a function as pain) and no grasping for a "good feeling" of happiness (gaining more parts? more abilities to do things? fulfilling a task, which calls a function strengthening the actions which led to that goal?), then perhaps the very definition of sentience is flawed: We're mapping a human flaw (is it?) onto a machine, that it will attempt to avoid the death (or rather the fear that pain will result before death).

      If a machine is concentrated only on the task at hand (a Zen sort of state) then does it need to worry about being shut off? Why does that need to be one of its goals?

      --
      -
    14. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Informative

      "But just to give you an intuition: Weak AI cannot plan, cannot judge, cannot explore"

      Some machine learning control systems are explicitly designed to form and execute plans. The ones that are designed to be trained in the real world are usually also designed to learn to do internal simulations (imagining what will happen if I do X) because feedback in the real world is slow.

      Judging is pretty much what machine learning systems do.

      Many reinforcement learning methods have a hyperparameter to explicitly control the amount of exploration the system does.

      Are you sure you're not thinking of 1960's era tech?

    15. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Seriously? Read at least an introductory text before disgracing yourself utterly.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    16. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

      Why should humans be the point of reference?

    17. Re: Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So basically,
      Weak AI = interpolation
      Strong AI = extrapolation

      Probably an oversimplification, but boiling down that thought down to it's essential root.

    18. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like data mining of a decade or two ago?

    19. Re: Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wrote a strong AI in college to give me values found in a 4-d steam table.

    20. Re: Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, the whole can be apparently greater than the sum of the parts. It's called emergent behaviour. In terms of physics not understanding it, a lack of a coherent definition is part of the problem.

    21. Re: Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      P.S. emergent behaviour does not need to invoke extra physicality. Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is voodoo.

    22. Re: Didn't we all assume that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Back in "the day", by which I refer to Hinton's day when he published his ground breaking papers and a decade or so thereafter, the talk was often about classifiers that would take a data set and partition it based on past examples, or clustering, that would tell you how the data was partitioned, along with PCA or use of RBFs for dimensionality reduction and to indicate the important dimensions in a multidimensional data set. But the AI people didn't really consider what we were doing to really be AI, more grey-box statistical trickery of low quality as rule-extraction was largely beyond us. We could demonstrate we could cluster and classify better than humans (our group was beating doctors on breast cancer diagnosis twenty years ago) but we could not reason about why, which would be like a person being able to kick a ball well but not being able to say why. (Our performance in the robot football competitions wasn't so good as making things that moved without self disassembly was not our strong point).

    23. Re:Didn't we all assume that? by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      Strong AI does not exist.

      Which is to say, "something that I define as not existing" does not exist.
      Profound.

  5. Whenever I would say something like this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was told that I as an idiot and would soon be replaced by a computer

  6. What's the point of this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Doesn't everyone here already know this? And why does he keep saying "way-cool?" Is this meant to be for children?

    1. Re:What's the point of this? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Doesn't everyone here already know this?

      Yes. TFA is just stating the obvious: AI is based on technology, and not magic. Deep learning is pattern recognition and statistical classification. Real life isn't like the movies. Duh.

  7. It really is like human intelligence. by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The human brain sees pattern everywhere it looks too.

    I'm retired now but I've been doing a lot of reading and experimentation with decision tree based classification methods. I like these because the produce models you can examine critically, as opposed to so-called "deep learning" algorithms which produce results that you pretty much have to judge by their giving you the result you expect. It's not that that isn't useful in some cases, but I don't find it as interesting.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    1. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by swillden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The human brain sees pattern everywhere it looks too.

      Yep. Pattern identification system identifies patterns, news at 11.

      OTOH, the ones I find interesting are the cases where ML identifies patterns that humans might not be able to identify. Sometimes this is less interesting for the potential to use a machine to identify these patterns than for the indication that patterns exist where we might think they don't.

      The recent paper on ML "gaydar", where researchers trained a machine to identify sexual orientation from dating site photos is a potentially-fascinating example. In that one I suspect the algorithm was mostly keying on things like hairstyle and other indicators that the people in the photos might be deliberately using to advertise their orientation (this was a dating site), but there seems to be some evidence that facial structure also played a significant role. Of course, given that the most common genders and orientations (cisgendered heterosexuals) are clearly strongly correlated with certain characteristic facial structures, it's certainly reasonable to expect that the same genetic and development processes that determine gender and orientation and clearly affect face structure in the common cases should also affect face structure in the less common cases. But humans can't really see these patterns. Absent behavioral clues, people have very bad "gaydar". But that doesn't mean the patterns aren't there, just that we can't see them. If ML can see strong correlations between facial structure and orientation (and I don't think this one study proves that), that tells us something about the nature of sexual orientation and the degree to which it is expressed in the body.

      --
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    2. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by tomhath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On one level, this study showed that you can correlate a conclusion (gay/not gay) with some pattern in the data. The problem is that it has only recognized a pattern in that particular data set.

      The article mentions the factors were probably grooming and how the person posed for the picture. Okay, that might be somewhat useful if you are trying to guess sexual preference from a picture on a dating site. But not necessarily, because they threw out sample pictures that didn't provide the clues they were looking for, and (I suspect) selected test pictures that did have the clues.

    3. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I did a few of those MOOCs a couple years back, among them "machine learning", which involved lots of math I didn't exactly understand (I know what integrals do but working the math? err...) but could stuff in a bit of matrix math, fudge it a bit, and have the class' toy problems work. It typically comes down to fitting a curve to the dataset and seeing if that works out ok as a classifier. Often enough, it does.

      I completely flunked the large hidden markov trees class. Well-known to be right-out hard and the lecurer's many references to a certain software vendor using the things didn't help. I've never noticed their wizards and fault finders actually doing anything but drop you from frying pan right into the fire. Happy dog, paperclip, and every other instance exactly the same. At least now I know why.

    4. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The usual methodology for training is you start with a big sample of data and you randomly divide the data into records into two subsets; the first you use to train the model and the second you use to test the results of the training.

      If there is no statistical difference between your training and testing groups, a better-than-random performance on the test data indicates that your algorithm actually learned something about the original universe of data. At that point you have the same problem you always have in statistics when you try to use your results: is some set of data you encounter in the wild so to speak really comparable to the data you build the model on?

      One of the advantages of regression learning is that a classification your model produces is rebuttable. This is very important in a world where some courts are using proprietary software in sentencing to classify people by how likely they are to re-offend.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    5. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by laurencetux · · Score: 2

      Good luck sorting out when the pattern is being matched wrong

      even out of costume i would bet Male (hetro) Ballet Dancers might be miss-classed and a bit of thought could come up with cases where all four? possible options could be chosen wrong ( i think the set is MG ,MS , FG and FS)

    6. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by hey! · · Score: 2

      A working knowledge of probability and statistics is probably more important than a working knowledge of calculus.

      Many, many years ago when I was a student I took the famously difficult stochastic processes course at MIT. Recently I went through MIT Open Courseware's 18.05 lectures, and was amazed by how much the teaching of probability and statistics has changed... and for the better.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    7. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by tomhath · · Score: 1

      The usual methodology for training is you start with a big sample of data and you randomly divide the data into records into two subsets; the first you use to train the model and the second you use to test the results of the training.

      Understood. But the population from which they drew the sample set was already filtered by humans for certain characteristics. So (as I said) what they found was a pattern in their carefully selected sample. No different than training a computer to distinguish between a square and a circle by showing it pictures of both.

    8. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by hey! · · Score: 1

      Right; I was just clarifying: nothing about the computerized methodology fixes the problems people have always had with statistical results, which is determining whether you are looking at a comparable sample to the one you obtained those results with.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    9. Re:It really is like human intelligence. by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      'Prob and stats' pre calc is just a memorize and regurgitate course. It's impossible to understand where the formulas come from without calc, so the students can only memorize and plug and chug.

      I took both the pre and post calc stats courses. First was easy, but not satisfying of need to understand.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    10. Re: It really is like human intelligence. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's an issue in terms of rule extraction. A human chick sexer might be able to tell you how they do it, a computer classifier not so much, so no use in teaching others. In terms of the research at hand then if rule extraction said hairstyle, then you could remove that data, and try again, until you had some underlying and irreducible set, or nothing.

      Without rule extraction there are techniques to try, such as clustering, but to do that you need to understand the data enough to be able to extract features and quantify them enough to create dimensions to cluster within, or do PCA on. Choosing dimensions almost begs the clustering question, and the process can be upset by poor feature extraction.

      Again, looking at the research in question, it may be telling us something about the choice of features, and to be robust analysis it should be repeated with different feature extraction per processing, assuming nothing in the way of rule extraction (or clustering) is possible. Some facial recognition systems, for example, reduce a face to a relatively small number of vectors. It is seemingly enough to recognise faces, but does it create artifacts in the data?

      Back in the early days of facial recognition we tried a simple two face discriminator for a university open day as it looked impressive and we had only been given a few hours to create it (image segmentation of satellite images to analyse land use was our day job). With two line drawings of faces we didn't realise all we had actually done was trained on ambient light conditions...

  8. So we're teaching Apophenia to computers now by H3lldr0p · · Score: 1

    Or at least headlines are trying to achieve it.

    Maybe we need to come up with a new word to describe when computers are used to generate meaningless connections between events. Or maybe we can add to Pareidolia's definition the idea that it can also find meaning in random information as well as sights and sounds. Oooo! That's it. Meta-Pareidolia. Finding meaning in random stimuli or information.

    1. Re: So we're teaching Apophenia to computers now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Works for me. We know there is some connection between quantum physics and general relativity, but we can't define it or observe it. There may be connections between everything in the universe for all we know.

  9. Who's AL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Who's this Albert person we keep hearing about? And maybe he'll even introduce a font that has unambiguous uppercase/lowercase letters.

    1. Re:Who's AL? by turkeydance · · Score: 1

      it's a condiment: A1

    2. Re:Who's AL? by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      Albert isn't the only name starting with "Al"! Your alphobism is invading my safe space! LOL.

      --
      Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
    3. Re:Who's AL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Noone knows Al.

    4. Re:Who's AL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well there is always Comic Sans... but for /. to support that would bring about the end of the world.

  10. The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by cdreimer · · Score: 1

    I've been hearing about Artificial Intelligence since I read it in BYTE Magazine in the 1980's.

    1. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by admin7087 · · Score: 2

      And it has been evolving at a steady pace since then. First, expert systems, then powerful defeasible reasoning systems and diagnosis, text-to-speech, rudimentary speech recognition, recommender systems. Now complex image recognition, music synthesis, intelligent search, working speech recognition and many more machine-learning based pattern recognition tasks. Given how young A.I. research is as a discipline, it has really made tremendous advances. Your phone can solve AI tasks that would have been considered inconceivable in the 60s. It may not yet seem human-like enough for you to be classified as intelligent behavior, but there is a threshold that will be passed probably still during this century.

    2. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by cdreimer · · Score: 1

      It may not yet seem human-like enough for you to be classified as intelligent behavior, but there is a threshold that will be passed probably still during this century.

      I used to work as a video game tester. I'm well familiar on human-like artificial idiocy can be. ;)

    3. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm well familiar on human-like artificial idiocy can be. ;)

      On? On what, you fucking natural idiot? ;)

    4. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by cdreimer · · Score: 1

      On? On what, you fucking natural idiot? ;)

      Slashdot. Or were you expecting Reddit?

    5. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm well familiar on Slashdot human-like artificial idiocy can be. ;)

      I was expecting a correction to your hare-brained sentence. I was clearly expecting too much.

    6. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dear Slashdot users:

      Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:

      Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.

      To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.

      The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!

      Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.

      I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
      http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

      Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
      https://www.cdreimer.com/slash...

      Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
      https://school.discoveryeducat...

      But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.

      Thank You dear users,
      -Nancy Guerrero

    7. Re:The AI's are coming! The AI's are coming! by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      How is text-to-speech considered AI? I built a text to speech computer (spo256-al2) in grade school. It's a lookup table in rom and a dma with counter you could build out of a few logic gates. It's a lot less ai than a web page with a text entry field.

  11. Trash science by Hentes · · Score: 2

    In the past it used to be stuff like "Scientists find that painting your room yellow leads to cancer!", now it's the same with AI. Turns out flipping through large amounts of statistical data until you happen upon a correlation is easily automated, and trash scientists will soon have to worry about their jobs.

    1. Re:Trash science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, AI confirms it: 95% of everything is crap.

    2. Re:Trash science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Turns out flipping through large amounts of statistical data until you happen upon a correlation is easily automated

      Correlation is not causation - if you can ensure this is an idealogy maintained throughout the codebase, you don't have to worry about those kind false positives. Considering anything can be modeled - I'd say humans falling victim to easy fallacies, regarding how they code the interpretation of the data, is the only problem presented.

    3. Re:Trash science by s_p_oneil · · Score: 1

      My favorite was a newspaper article I read sometime in the late 80's announcing: "Scientists discover that all food causes cancer!"

      It was amusing, but it was also a pretty good article explaining that if you took a bunch of lab rats and raised them on a diet of a concentrated form of one specific type of food (and allowed them to eat nothing else), they pretty much always developed cancer and died at a significantly higher rate. It then pointed out that a number of recent articles claiming various foods caused cancer had cited studies that did exactly that.

  12. I'm Impressed! by avandesande · · Score: 0

    Creating FUD requires fairly high level AI.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  13. Seems like Byrne does not get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From the summary: "Anything that can be represented in some fashion by patterns within data ... can be 'predicted' by machine learning models given sufficient historical data."

    This is nothing to sneeze at! In many cases, humans are *not* able to do accurate prediction given sufficient historical data.

  14. Do you want to play a game? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This article wrote by Artificial Intelligence.

  15. Nothing ne here, really by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1, Troll

    AI has been ridiculously (and recklessly) hyped since its inception as an academic discipline. This is just more of the same. Unfortunately, the implication is that it is just as difficult today, as it was 60 years ago, to take AI seriously, despite what some fearmongers out there who, drunk with success in one area, seem to think that they are experts on everything, would like people to believe.

    1. Re:Nothing ne here, really by s_p_oneil · · Score: 1

      I think by now most slashdotters realize that Elon is a bit of an asshat. In theory, military leaders could decide to put too much faith in AI-driven tanks, bombers, etc. too soon, but while it may make an interesting plot device in a book or a movie, IRL military leaders are much more risk-averse (which is definitely a good thing).

      When it comes to AI, I would be more worried about terrorists trying to build a deadly version of this:
      https://boingboing.net/2012/03...

      It's not like a suicide bomber would consider any target something like this might shoot to be the "wrong" target, so the AI could be complete crap and still have the desired effect. As long as they could make it rack up a high body count and generate a lot of fear, it would be considered a great success.

  16. And when it notices patterns.. by maitai · · Score: 2

    AI notices patterns that detect cancer. Woot! AI notices patterns that determines crime rates amongst certain population groups! Fuq no. (I can't wait until someone calls AI sexist for it noticing that females get pregnant much more often than males)

    1. Re:And when it notices patterns.. by burtosis · · Score: 1

      Not exactly the same but almost

    2. Re:And when it notices patterns.. by dslauson · · Score: 1

      AI notices patterns that detect cancer. Woot! AI notices patterns that determines crime rates amongst certain population groups! Fuq no.

      Hey, cool dog whistle, bro!

      Any algorithm (including AI and machine learning based algorithms) is only as good as the data you feed it. You can cite crime statistics for "certain populations", and to you, that looks like evidence for your shitty racist agenda. To me, it look a lot like evidence of the systemic over-policing and disproportional enforcement on those same communities.

      Example:

      Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

      Mine that data, and your algorithm will likely you that drug-related crimes are significantly higher for Black people. It's impossible to remove the inherent systemic bias from those numbers, though, and, as such, they're pretty much worthless.

    3. Re:And when it notices patterns.. by nine-times · · Score: 1

      AI notices patterns that determines crime rates amongst certain population groups! Fuq no.

      I don't think that the problem is necessarily detecting higher crime rates among a certain population group. The problem is using that correlation to draw the conclusion, "Therefore those people are naturally more likely to commit crime."

      Even if that conclusion isn't explicitly spelled out, it's still a problem when raw statistics are interpreted to be support for bigotry. If a scientist is studying crime statistics among specific population groups, they should be careful in how they formulate the study, and how they report their findings, to make sure they don't give a false impression that would validate bigotry.

  17. Studies are not the problem. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    Studies simply exist to inform others of a topic of interest. The problem is not the studies being scary, the problem is that highly technical information is inappropriately being repackaged and pushed out to the general public who have no insight into topic. The problem isn't the message itself, it's the messengers.

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    1. Re:Studies are not the problem. by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      The problem isn't the message itself, it's the messengers.

      I agree with that statement, but understood in its widest sense: not just the target audience, also a big proportion of people performing these studies. Finding reliable enough trends to get truly worthy insights into a wide variety of phenomena is certainly possible. The problem is that getting that ideal result in quite a few scenarios is really difficult; it requires lots of knowledge (including high quality information), objectivity and resources which are rarely available.

      AI knows if you have skin cancer.

      That sentence refers to a goal which is quite likely to be accomplished within pretty high accuracy levels. But the huge number of possible scenarios (different types of cancer, different skins, etc.) and further technical hurdles (automating the reliable analysis of a so big number of images is a quite complex task in itself) are incompatible with the surrounding buzzword, give-me-quick-results, show-me-something-I-can-understand constraints. To not mention the fact that lying (or partially telling the truth or focusing on a very favourable set of conditions or wanting way too much to get good results) is usually quite easy because of the aforementioned gimme-something-quick.

      DISCLAIMER: all the aforementioned ideas reflect my impressions about the most common problems in certain areas of expertise. Nothing of this applies to me. I have always been extremely cautious, objective and honest when dealing with these situations. On the other hand, I have never been involved in situations like trying to come up with a reliable way to diagnose cancer.

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    2. Re:Studies are not the problem. by swillden · · Score: 1

      The problem isn't the message itself, it's the messengers.

      I agree with that statement, but understood in its widest sense: not just the target audience, also a big proportion of people performing these studies. Finding reliable enough trends to get truly worthy insights into a wide variety of phenomena is certainly possible. The problem is that getting that ideal result in quite a few scenarios is really difficult; it requires lots of knowledge (including high quality information), objectivity and resources which are rarely available.

      Science is an error correction process. To a first order approximation (and probably to a third-order approximation), every scientific paper ever published is wrong. The reason science works is that the iterated process of conjecture and criticism -- in the broadest meaning of "criticism", which includes experimental testing, and lots more -- gradually identifies and weeds out errors. So the science on any given topic asymptotically approaches correctness in the long run, but the initial efforts look more like a random walk as people begin to scope out the solution space.

      The problem is that that vast majority of people fundamentally don't understand how science works, the press included. So the press packages early results and presents them as "science". And they are scientific results, and in many cases may represent the best current scientific knowledge on a topic... but "best current" isn't the same thing as "good". Even worse, because science works by proposing and testing answers to very precise questions, the press reports not what the scientists actually examined, but some generalization of what they examined.

      So, the press reports generalizations of preliminary results as "science", and laypeople expect those generalizations to be authoritative Truth. But science basically never provides authoritative Truth, and certainly doesn't provide anything remotely close to it early on. This is clearly a recipe for regularly-repeated disaster, and is exactly why so many laypeople have simply given up on science, preferring pyramids and crystals and things that feel truthy.

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    3. Re:Studies are not the problem. by Luthair · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately the majority of journalists have no particular background or knowledge of the beat they cover.

    4. Re:Studies are not the problem. by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      the press reports not what the scientists actually examined, but some generalization of what they examined.

      You and the parent poster are mostly focused on what, IMO, is just a consequence of the problem: the non-specialised press, PR, public opinion, etc. You should ask yourselves another question: why are these people who aren't in a position to adequately understand partial outputs being given those at all? Because certain scientific subfields aren't precisely being managed in a too scientific way and this the real problem: objective correctness, critical attitudes, long-term expectations, growth of the scientific knowledge as a whole, etc. are being ignored on exchange of funding or some minutes of fame.

      The AI trend, like many others before and after it, has attracted lots of attention, what means easy money, not-knowledgeable interests, decisions not meant to accomplish long-term, sensible scientific goals. Who is to blame for this? All the people involved who have allowed irrelevant, short-sighted concerns to seriously impact the long-term scientific activity. It is isn't just the press not transmitting ideas about which their audience doesn't care anyway. It is also the activity itself, the pursued goals and expectations. The experts not acting as such ("I need this and that to get what you want under very specific conditions"), but as pusillanimous executors ("I will do all what you want"). Additionally, data-related fields are associated with very complex problems which might be seen as simple; blindly trusting abstract conclusions without critically analysing the whole situation seems also relatively easy.

      Some things are difficult to be changed, if possible at all; but the first step is to be completely aware about the problem. It is certainly about ignorance, but the whole picture is much bigger than what you seem to imply. And in any case, complaining about others' actions and wishing that everyone was different isn't the best way to proceed. If you don't want AI-related research to be mocked, what about not systematically releasing papers drawing generic conclusions about virtually-incomprehensible realities from a few hand-picked data points? You can find various descriptive samples of this just by looking at the Slashdot articles during the last month.

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    5. Re:Studies are not the problem. by swillden · · Score: 1

      You and the parent poster are mostly focused on what, IMO, is just a consequence of the problem: the non-specialised press, PR, public opinion, etc. You should ask yourselves another question: why are these people who aren't in a position to adequately understand partial outputs being given those at all? Because certain scientific subfields aren't precisely being managed in a too scientific way and this the real problem: objective correctness, critical attitudes, long-term expectations, growth of the scientific knowledge as a whole, etc. are being ignored on exchange of funding or some minutes of fame.

      That does not follow. You're arguing that in order to be objective, have properly critical attitudes, etc. scientists need to keep their results secret, or at least avoid letting anyone not sufficiently versed in the relevant science to know about them. The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

      Scientists should publish detailed papers with accurate abstracts. It's not their job to withhold information from others who they don't think are able to understand it. Indeed, trying to decide who should and shouldn't learn of their work would be a serious waste of time which could be better spent on research. And if scientists find it useful to promote their work in order to obtain funding, that demonstrates a flaw in the way the work is funded, but you're trying to call it a failing of the scientists.

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    6. Re:Studies are not the problem. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Kill the messengers!

    7. Re:Studies are not the problem. by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      That does not follow. You're arguing that in order to be objective, have properly critical attitudes, etc. scientists need to keep their results secret, or at least avoid letting anyone not sufficiently versed in the relevant science to know about them. The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

      I think that my post is quite clear; at least, if you read it completely by trying to understand all the ideas within the right context and as per my intention. Additionally, today I have a pretty busy day and cannot spend too much time here. Sorry, but that first paragraph is enough for me to assume that no possible (quick enough) understanding will happen here. I am not trying to be offensive, just practical. Bye.

      --
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    8. Re:Studies are not the problem. by swillden · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I can only read what you write, not what you mean.

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    9. Re:Studies are not the problem. by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I can only read what you write, not what you mean.

      Good one. I meant exactly what I wrote. This morning, after reading your last comment, I thought that our positions were too different, what is likely to provoke a long abstract discussion to nowhere. Usually, I continue the conversation for a while anyway, but today I was really busy and sped up the process a bit. Your ideas are quite clear (scientific community acting fine and the press and public opinion being the only problem) and I guess that mine too (scientific community not always acting too scientifically). I am happy with that reality and I don't see the point of discussion more about it. Clearer now?

      --
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  18. AI defines bougs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bogosity, the unit of bogusness, is named after Douglas Lenat for his work in AI.

  19. It's just marketing wank by JohnFen · · Score: 1

    "AI" has simply joined "Web 2.0", "Cloud", and countless other terms that are meaningless buzzwords for use by marketing departments.

    1. Re:It's just marketing wank by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      But will AI be Smart?

      --
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    2. Re:It's just marketing wank by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      Of course! CyberSmart.

    3. Re:It's just marketing wank by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Next...

      "The CyberSmart IOI: Internet of Intelligences!"

  20. AI's primary function by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is to digitally fingerprint everyone and make encryption useless. In five or ten years, "signing in" to a website will be a joke. The AI will know who you are just based on your browsing habits and hardware. Have you ever AC'ed on Slashdot but signed in on other issues? An AI in its current form could accurately pair those to you. Facefarm invests and profits while the world's governments collect insanely accurate biometrics. Encryption will become useless because of digital fingerprinting and perhaps it would be easier to make it illegal. This way, the AI can identify "who" did the encryption and the "what" part of the message wouldn't matter. However, in the right computer (quantum?), I don't see why an AI couldn't decrypt most communication in a timely manner. One of its father's was Alan Turing for goodness sake. They make out like AI is for troll prevention, medicine, future lawyer bots, etc., while all under the umbrella of "open source," but you really need to ask yourself where does most of the funding for AI come from?

  21. So-called 'AI' doesn't 'know' ANYTHING by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The shitty, half-assed, weak-ass excuse for artificial intelligence that everyone keeps trotting out to us does not 'know' a single thing -- because words like 'know' imply cognition (i.e. ability to think) and none of these shitty machines 'thinks' at all, not any more than a flowchart on a piece of paper 'thinks'.

    You want some real fear of so-called 'AI'? It's the mis-application of it by too many people who do not understand it's (limited!) capabilities; the fear that some nudnik will put one of these half-assed iron idiots in charge of something way too important and potentially dangerous, thinking it'll 'figure it out itself', then just walk away. Sometime later: KABOOM. That's what you should be afraid of. That's also why I'll never set foot into any so-called 'self driving car' either, because I AM NOT READY TO DIE JUST YET.

    ***MIC DROP***

  22. But isn't that the whole point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I realize I'm going against the grain here, but isn't the whole power of AI the fact that it *can* make predictions based on historical data?

    Imagine you went to 1950 and told them about features in Google Docs. They would lose their nut over some of the most basic stuff: you can delete a word and retype it in *seconds*! Wow! And they would be right to be amazed. What we take for granted now is huge in terms of what it does for productivity. Imagine having to correct errors on paper by hand.

    So now we have AI and *all* it can do is examine data, find patterns, and extrapolate. How pedestrian. Or should I say, how absolutely, magically fucking fantastical.

    By the way, I remember in the early 1990s people complaining about how useless computers were, because they were expensive and didn't do very much. Let's look back on this discussion in 2030 and see how it panned out.

  23. And I have a program... by Torodung · · Score: 1

    And I have a program in LISP that I wrote 30 years ago that has been saying the human race won't live past this week, every week, for three decades.

    This is proof that we live in a virtual universe, probably written in Brainfuck.

  24. Biological by footNipple · · Score: 1

    AI or machine learning is just computing. That's all it is. And with better and faster computing resources, we can do more with it which makes sense. However, for "real" AI or machine learning to occur, there will need to be a biological substrate upon which such systems are to be built. I think this is the case because I believe that intelligent life is the universe's only way to "truly" conserve information.

  25. I think the problem is by rsilvergun · · Score: 0

    nobody is expecting Machine Learning to be put to use in making people's lives better. More productive, yes, but not better. We're expecting three things from Machine Learning:

    a. Prices will go up as ML makes it easier to figure out the maximum you can get away with charging and control/constrict supply chains.

    b. Wages will go down as ML increases productivity per working.

    c. The 1% will use ML to skim even more off the economy leaving the rest of us with less and less

    When I was a kid there were discounts and sales everywhere. Real ones. Bargin bins where just full of cheap Chinese junk, they were full of oversupply. Bags of Halloween candy that used to be 90% off are now 20-30% off and there's damn few of them. I don't see 'manager's specials' or those cheap bags (yes bags) of donuts I used love. Maybe if you didn't grow poor you didn't notice any of this. But for anyone living poor (which given America's $59k median household income is a lot of people) you notice.

    ML brings massive increases in efficiency, but for most of us that's actually a bad thing...

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  26. SOMEONE DISABLED YOUR MEMORY MODULE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    (Presented in autism for the emotionally impaired)
    weyland-yutani nostromo 180924
    subject chris reimer would have been approximately 14 years old living in silicon valley when byte magazine dated april 1984 (autism epoch: 449625600) was released.
    analysis: it is highly unlikely that this was the first time chris dale reimer was exposed to the concept of artificial intelligence given his age, location, and the time of publication. access to byte magazine would also indicate prior exposure to artificial intelligence.
    conclusion: christopher dale reimer has an autistic compulsion to hyperlink in posts regardless of monitization

    1. Re:SOMEONE DISABLED YOUR MEMORY MODULE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Didn't you get the memo? All the wanker trolls are dog piling this comment with inane comments for today. Get with the program.

  27. Machine Learning can be dropped from title by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1
    Many Studies Don't Actually Show Anything Meaningful, But They Spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

    Fixed it for you.

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  28. Maschine Learning is not Maschine Learning by prefec2 · · Score: 1

    There are trainable models such AS neural networks/deep learning and statistical models. There are also models which habe to be configured. We can even combine them. In the end this is all just classification mechanisms. They are all good at detecting known issues. They are not able to come up with new stuff.