AI is coming for you, or is it?
There seems to be a large amount of both excitement and fear around the emergence of artificial intelligence. Will it take over? What is it? Can it save the world? Those are all very big questions, and for a new technology to generate these sorts of questions and to actually make us question its impact it could have on our lives. This really illustrates just how big people think it is, or could be.I'll save many of the explanation of AI to much of the published articles and just sum it up: AI is a new brain, we have made a new brain without giving birth to a new person or other organic being, but instead building a machine. This brain has a tremendous amount of capability, but it doesn't have the knowledge required to be useful yet. It need to learn, and be trained.
What seems to cultivate fears in people is the amount of time ti take to provide the brain with knowledge. People take years of care and feeding to become thinking adults, AI machines can seemingly take minutes or hours to learn analogous tasks. Why would we be scared of that capability?
For good or evil?
How is it that just because the someone is smart that the others around them assume their intentions to be good, or evil? Just because a person can overwhelm another physically or mentally, does it follow that they will? That seems to be a reach, and we might know better by understanding the impact good people have had. It would follow then, if the person knew the difference between good and evil and the consequences of each school of thought; then they would make decisions with the intention of the good. This understanding of not taking a piece of the pie, but instead making a bigger pie and sharing it shows enlightenment of that persons intellect. The training of the AI machine may not be any different.Are you scared when you meet a smart person? Are you scared when you meet a dumb one? Maybe they deserve the same reaction; but in the meeting of people during the course of a day you will surely generate a lot of fear for yourself.
Decisions, decisions
Why then do people make bad decisions? There are biases that lead them down bad paths. They fall victim to their own deficiencies to justify actions that are vain, greedy, gluttons, envy, etc. They just don't seem to be able to help themselves. The AI brain may present an opportunity to provide decision making that is free of these organic human constraints.Humans are able to reason and solve problems effectively; but run into difficulties when the brain is clouded by ideologies; whether they are political or religious ones. For AI to help solve us solve some of our own problems, it can be trained to do so; as long as that training isn't an ideological nature.
Bias
Bias needs to be learned. For the various biases that complicate people making good decisions. Confirmation bias, survivor bias or loss aversion; these are learned behaviors and reside in the sub-conscious to be triggered at any time. This can happen without the host really know what is going on.This is also not consistent. People have bad days, and the anxiety of having a bad (or good) day will affect your decision making. As long as the electricity is on; machines don't by nature have bad days.
To Train AI properly, the validation of the training needs to incorporate not just what the machine knows, but the validate what it doesn't know, and then provide the training so that the machine is adverse to learning the bad habits.
Is this not the same as raising a child or mentoring an apprentice? It might not be that different in what we are doing; but how we do it can be improved to get better outcomes in the decisions the machine (or person) makes.
