Interpretability

When are predictions policies?

Whether you are speaking to corporate managers, Silicon Valley script kiddies, or seasoned academics pitching commercial applications of their research, you’re likely to hear a lot of claims about what AI is going to do.

Hysterical discussions about AI machine learning’s applicability begin with a breathless recap of breakthroughs in predictive modeling (9X.XX% accuracy on ImageNet!, 5.XX% word error rate on speech recognition!) and then abruptly leap to prophesies of miraculous technologies that AI will drive in the near future: automated surgeons, human-level virtual assistants, robo-software development, AI-based legal services.

This sleight of hand elides a key question—when are accurate predictions sufficient for guiding actions?

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AI safety going mainstream at NIPS 2017

[This article originally appeared on the Deep Safety blog.]

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This year’s NIPS gave me a general sense that near-term AI safety is now mainstream and long-term safety is slowly going mainstream. On the near-term side, I particularly enjoyed Kate Crawford’s keynote on neglected problems in AI fairness, the ML security workshops, and the Interpretable ML symposium debate that addressed the “do we even need interpretability?” question in a somewhat sloppy but entertaining way. There was a lot of great content on the long-term side, including several oral / spotlight presentations and the Aligned AI workshop.

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The Deception of Supervised Learning – V2

[This article is a revised version reposted with permission from KDnuggets]

Imagine you’re a doctor tasked with choosing a cancer therapy. Or a Netflix exec tasked with recommending movies. You have a choice. You could think hard about the problem and come up with some rules. But these rules would be overly simplistic, not personalized to the patient or customer. Alternatively, you could let the data decide what to do!

The ability to programmatically make intelligent decisions by learning complex decision rules from big data is a driving selling point of machine learning. Leaps forward in the predictive accuracy of supervised learning techniques, especially deep learning, now yield classifiers that outperform human predictive accuracy on many tasks. We can guess how an individual will rate a movie, classify images, or recognize speech with jaw-dropping accuracy. So why not make our services smart by letting the data tell us what to do?

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