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The Real Threat is Machine Incompetence, Not Intelligence

posted by on Tuesday February 07 2017, @05:18PM   
from the this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-goto dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Forget super-AI. Crappy AI is more likely to be our downfall, argues researcher.

[...] It's not that computer scientists haven't argued against AI hype, but an academic you've never heard of (all of them?) pitching the headline "AI is hard" is at a disadvantage to the famous person whose job description largely centers around making big public pronouncements. This month that academic is Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who argues in the Communications of the ACM that there is a real AI threat, but it's not human-like machine intelligence gone amok. Quite the opposite: the danger is instead shitty AI. Incompetent, bumbling machines.

Bundy notes that most all of our big-deal AI successes in recent years are extremely narrow in scope. We have machines that can play Jeopardy and Go—at tremendous cost in both cases—but that's nothing like general intelligence.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-real-threat-is-machine-incompetence-not-intelligence

An interesting take on the AI question. What do Soylentils think of this scenario ?

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Original Submission

• Watson already knows what it doesn't know Watson already knows what it doesn't know (Score: 3, Interesting) by Ken_g6 on Tuesday February 07 2017, @07:04PM

  by Ken_g6 (3706) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @07:04PM (#464215)

  When it was on Jeopardy, Watson knew when not to buzz in. The only really absurdly wrong answer I can remember it giving was on a Final Jeopardy question, where it wasn't allowed to say, "I don't know."

  Now the main threat might be if marketing refuses to let Watson say, "I don't know", in other situations.

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• Re:Watson already knows what it doesn't know (Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:12PM

  by vux984 (5045) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:12PM (#464249)

  Cite for the watson gaffe? I can't find it. I did find the one where it replied toronto instead of chicago for a relatively easy question. (the one about a US city with airports named after WWII hero / battle.) But the followup covered Watson's reasoning fairly well -- indicating that it had underweighted the category name due to the categories frequently being more suggestive than prescriptive. And Chicago had been its 2nd choice.
  It also didn't bet heavy on its bad answer, so it still won.

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/15/watson-final-jeopardy_n_823795.html [huffingtonpost.com]

  Is that the one you are talking about?

  Parent