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Will Knight writes:
No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.
Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn't look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. 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. Information from the vehicle's sensors goes straight into a huge network of artificial neurons that process the data and then deliver the commands required to operate the steering wheel, the brakes, and other systems. The result seems to match the responses you'd expect from a human driver. But what if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can't ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.
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.
[...] The U.S. military is pouring billions into projects that will use machine learning to pilot vehicles and aircraft, identify targets, and help analysts sift through huge piles of intelligence data. Here more than anywhere else, even more than in medicine, there is little room for algorithmic mystery, and the Department of Defense has identified explainability as a key stumbling block.
[...] At some stage we may have to simply trust AI's judgement or do without using it. Likewise, that judgement will have to incorporate social intelligence. Just as society is built upon a contract of expected behaviour, we will need to design AI systems to respect and fit with our social norms. If we are to create robot tanks and other killing machines, it is important that their decision-making be consistent with our ethical judgements.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/
What do you think, would you trust such AI even if you couldn't parse its methods? Is deep learning AI technology inherently un-knowable?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:38PM
Automated or autonomous cars are often pitched with an abolishment of private property theme, sometimes the from each according to their ability and to each according to their need is stronger than the autonomous car message itself. I don't think its a useful or effective strategy. I mean, that kind of sales pitch never sold an automatic transmission, or a engine computer automatic choke (yeah, I'm old enough to have driven carb cars), or power windows. Why do you need the workers of the world to unite to enjoy this fine automatic electric hands free convertible top. I'm not signalling against autonomous cars or communism although I have in the past; I'm specifically countersignalling the method of selling "self driving cars AS communism".
About this point I break out the analogy of I don't wear underwear at night (err when I'm asleep) so why not use a drone shipment so some other dude can share my briefs, I mean why would I want the unimaginable hassle of owning my own briefs when I could hire an expensive middleman to rent me temporary use of some shared briefs, kinda of like an underwear pimp but in trendy mobile phone app format. Speaking of pimps, my underwear is washed often enough to not be sentient or autonomous or automated (although that could be kinda cool...), but my wife is sentient and autonomous and I'm only enjoying her marital services for a couple minutes a day (whoo honey that was a fun 30 seconds) so naturally in our sharing gig economy I should be able use an app like wife-r where she could manage a redundant array of inexpensive husbands, aka a RAIH array. I mean, dude, wives are expensive, so some sort of timesharing threaded app is totally the way of the future. The UI is very modern, looks nice but not terribly effective. Yup I think we need to innovate legacy technology like marriage, get some apps in there, collect some rent as middlemen, yeah...
A meme that is truly unappreciated today is the concept of the gig economy middleman as pimp. Or maybe the unappreciated meme is pimp as gig economy middleman. Either way I find it an annoying feature of depersonalized anti-socialized modern life that we rely on mobile phone apps to act as our pimps instead of fine upstanding human citizens such as seen in 1970s era blaxsplotitaion movies which used to fill UHF TV airwaves after 11pm or so on weekends in the good old days. Every time I hear about Uber I think its CEO should have a pink 70s caddy with furry steering wheel and 'fro haircut speaking the worst jive 70s hollywood could produce. That sounds like Uber to me.