Ethics and AI
A wise AI should say “I don’t know”
Artificial Stupidity is being built every day.
One of the hallmark of wisdom is to recognize the vast amount of knowledge one doesn’t have. Not just the known unknown, but the size of the Unknown Unknowns. Or if look at the our current AIs under the prism of the Dunning-Kruger effect, every system we use will fall in the “low ability” category.
Yesterday, I attended a talk at #PyData London from one of the makers of scikit-Lego, Vincent D. Warmerdam. Beside being of great quality and inspirational, it framed some of my musings in a way that is both relevant to enhancing ethical use of AI and easy to communicate.
The first takeaway is this simple sentence:
Machine Learning algorithms are champions of interpolation, not extrapolation.
I think that were we to survey all data scientists and engineers that are involved in putting these algorithms in production, we’d be surprised at proportion that don’t have an active understanding of that fact, or potentially worse, decide to ignore it.
It is with great surprise that in the past, I found myself facing a misconception in conversations about modeling, where the behavior of said model wasn’t well understood outside of the boundary it…
