An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by bsaul on Sunday June 14, 2020 @05:40PM (#23521616)

since you’re working on the field : i’m still under the impression that modern ML (neural network in particular) are not producing any science, nor are they producing any level of understanding of the phenomenon it’s trying to model. And that as such, we can’t provide a reliable estimate of the limitations of the produced model, other than by feeding it tons of inputs and measure the result.

It would be like trying to understand gravity by throwing thousands of rocks, measuring the motions, and build an approximation on a huge matrix, without ever being able to get the « real » netwonian formula.

Am i correct ?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by bcrosby95 on Sunday June 14, 2020 @05:59PM (#23521736)

Some of this would be considered a feature by companies. It's more defensible to have unknowable AI deciding to do illegal things than programmers hard coding illegal things. Which really boggles my mind. When my kid does something illegal I'm held liable. When an ML algorithm programmed by a team of people does, nothing we can do about that!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by burntoutfire on Monday June 15, 2020 @02:21PM (#23530996)

I'm not sure if the courts will see it this way. Anyway, in some fields some stuff (e.g. credit scoring in banka in my country) is regulated and it's the humans who have to make the final decisions - algoriths can only provide an input. In practice, the input is "approve/deny", but it's still a human who is making a "decision" based on this "input".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by perl4ever on Sunday June 14, 2020 @10:13PM (#23523170)

I don't see this as really a unique situation or one where people are exempt from liability. If someone starts a fire, they are held liable; that's analogous.

On the other hand, the difference between a team of people and a particular person with mens rea, that's not unique to AI either.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by smabie on Monday June 15, 2020 @05:12PM (#23533036)

>When my kid does something illegal I'm held liable

This isn't true.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in by martindbp on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:48PM (#23541250)

What makes you think Newtonian physics is in any form more real than computation? If Wolfram is correct, physics is inherently a computation in the form of cellular automata.

Intelligence might be so messy that the only way to get to it is to grow it organically, which to me seems to be happening in research. People are trying a bunch of stuff based on intuitions for what may work, and post hoc adding some theoretical justification for why it's working. Human intelligence didn't emerge from some grand theory of intelligence either.

[ Parent | on HN ]