AI is now so complex its creators can’t trust why it makes decisions
Written by Dave Gershgorn
December 07, 2017
https://qz.com/1146753/ai-is-now-so-...YPL&yptr=yahoo
Artificial intelligence is seeping into every nook and cranny of modern life. AI might tag your friends in photos on Facebook
or choose what you see on Instagram, but materials scientists and NASA researchers are also beginning to use the technology for scientific discovery and space exploration.
But there’s a core problem with this technology, whether it’s being used in social media or for the Mars rover:
The programmers that built it don’t know why AI makes one decision over another.
Modern artificial intelligence is still new. Big tech companies have only ramped up investment and research in the last five years, after a decades-old theory was shown to finally work in 2012. Inspired by the human brain, an artificial neural network relied on layers of thousands to millions of tiny connections between “neurons” or little clusters of mathematic computation, like the connections of neurons in the brain. But that software architecture came with a trade-off: Since the changes throughout those millions of connections were so complex and minute,
researchers aren’t able to exactly determine what is happening. They just get an output that works....
...As these
artificial neural networks are starting to be used in law enforcement, healthcare, scientific research, and determining which news you see on Facebook, researchers are saying there’s a problem with what some have called
AI’s “black box.” Previous research has shown that
algorithms amplify biases in the data from which they learn, and make inadvertent connections between ideas.....
...“As machine learning becomes more prevalent in society—and the stakes keep getting higher and higher—people are beginning to realize that
we can’t treat these systems as infallible and impartial black boxes,” Hanna Wallach, a senior researcher at Microsoft and speaker at the conference, tells Quartz in an email.
“We need to understand what’s going on inside them and how they are being used.”...