The Guardian view on artificial intelligence: not a technological problem

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Right on!!!

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: April 19, 2018 at 9:11:10 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Guardian view on artificial intelligence: not a technological problem
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Guardian view on artificial intelligence: not a technological problem
> The dream of a computer system with godlike powers and the wisdom to use them well is merely a theological construct
> By Editorial
> Apr 16 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/16/the-guardian-view-on-artificial-intelligence-not-a-technological-problem>
>
> The House of Lords report on the implications of artificial intelligence is a thoughtful document which grasps one 
> rather important point: this is not only something that computers do. Machine learning is the more precise term for 
> the technology that allows computers to recognise patterns in enormous datasets and act on them. But even machine 
> learning doesn’t happen only inside computer networks, because these machines are constantly tended and guided by 
> humans. You can’t say that Google’s intelligence resides either in its machines or in its people: it depends on both 
> and emerges from their interplay. Complex software is never written to a state of perfection and then left to run for 
> ever. It is constantly being tweaked, increasingly often as part of an arms race with other software or networks that 
> are being used to outwit it. And at every step of the way, human bias and human perspectives are involved. It 
> couldn’t be otherwise. The dream of a computer system with godlike powers and the wisdom to use them well is a 
> theological construct, not a technological possibility.
>
> The question, then, is which forms of bias and which perspectives are desirable, and which we should guard against. 
> It is easy to find chilling examples – the Googleimage recognition program that couldn’t distinguish between black 
> people and gorillas, because it had been trained on a dataset where almost all the human faces were white or Asian; 
> the program used by many American jurisdictions to make parole descriptions turns out to be four times as likely to 
> recommend that white criminals be freed than black ones when all other things are equal. Without human judgment we 
> are helpless against the errors introduced by earlier human judgments. This has been known for some time, but the 
> report discusses these dangers very clearly.
>
> One thing that has changed in recent years is that a lot of the underlying technology has been democratised. What had 
> used to require the resources of huge corporations can now be done by private individuals, either by using the 
> publicly available networks of Amazon, Google, and other giants, or simply by using cleverly designed software on 
> private computers. Face recognition and voice recognition are both now possible in this way, and both will be used by 
> malicious actors as well as benevolent ones. Most worries about the misuse of facial recognition software stem from 
> their authoritarian use in places like China, where some policemen are already wearing facial recognition cameras, 
> and concert-goers at large events are routinely scanned to see if they are of interest to the police. But the 
> possibilities when they get into the hands of anarchists or apolitical bullies are also worrying.
>
> [snip]
>
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