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How to Become an Expert on A.I.

The New York Times. How to Become an Expert on A.I. Part 1 of our weeklong series

  • See also The New York Times – A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us
  • See also WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “…Deep learning networks may look like brains, but that doesn’t mean they can think like humans. On the ever-expanding meganet, that’s a problem…Deep learning’s insufficiency is more insidious than its errors. Errors we have a chance of noticing, but the structural inadequacies of deep learning produce subtler and more systemic effects whose flaws are often not at all obvious. It is risky to outsource human thought to machines that lack the capacity for such thought. At the meganet scale, deep learning’s analysis is so wide-ranging and complex that in failing to understand language, it skews the entirety of our online experience in unpredictable and often unmeasurable directions. As we turn administration of meganets over to these deep-learning brains, they presort the information we feed into them by distinctions that neither we nor they can even specify. Every time Google provides us with a suggested response to a text message or Amazon proposes the next book we should read, that is deep learning doing the thinking for us. The more we adopt its suggestions, the more we reinforce its tendencies. It is often unclear whether these tendencies are “right” or “wrong,” or even exactly what those tendencies are. And we don’t have the opportunity to question them.”

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