Machine learning algorithms are very good at curve-fitting models. But what kind of technology is available for explaining models that are intuitive to humans? medium.com/intuitionmachi…
When AlphaGo executed move #37, what was its explanation? The only explanation was that a human would not make the same move. Is this a good explanation?
It is curious to note that AlphaGo was aware of what was a human move. This is perhaps not the case for AlphaZero that trained from scratch. How does AlphaZero explain itself in terms of human abstractions that it does not know about?
Explaining something requires knowledge of the abstractions that another is familiar with. Explaining something to a five-year-old is different from explaining something to an expert.
There are more problems with solutions that cannot be explained to humans than there are explainable ones. AIs that are black boxes are not problematic for the former kind.
However, for the kinds of problems that involve humans, we absolutely require explainable AIs. Because to understand the needs of humans requires the same understanding of human abstractions as being able to explain solutions.
To create a conversational or empathic intelligence requires an understanding of the metaphors the humans are familiar with. medium.com/intuitionmachi…
The difficulty of explanation is that it requires the skill of a teacher. A teacher is able to read the mind of a student and understand the best way to formulate a narrative that a student can grasp. An AI that explains also understands how humans think.
This is problematic. What we need instead are AIs that explain themselves like a child explains themselves to a parent. That is, the sophistication of the AI is lower than the sophistication of its user.
There are perhaps other alternatives where the AI solving a problem is different from the AI that crafts the explanation.
But it's important to make the distinction between AI's responsible for human-cyber relations (i.e. C3PO) and AI's that perform complex work (i.e. R2D2).
It occurred to me the @BretWeinstein is crafting his concern about the covid19 vaccines in a way to appeal to a specific crowd and avoiding the more likely dangerous scenario. This is why his message is biased and self-serving. Let me explain.
Weinstein argues that there is a concern that vaccines being imperfect (as they always are) will give the virus an opportunity for a breakthrough that can lead to an arms race. Oddly enough, he doesn't apply the same logic for cures like the unsubstantiated one he promotes.
However, the obvious danger is that the mRNA virus mutates faster proportionally to the size of the unvaccinated and infected group. We already saw this in India where the most dangerous delta variant emerged from a huge population of unvaccinated.
I'm composing this tweetstorm from a tweetstorm of a dream I had. It begins with the idea that Ptolemy's model of the movement of the planets was extremely accurate.
Ptolemy's model was accurate enough to be very useful for navigators of their time. But it worked well because it was finely tuned to fit with observed experimental data.
But was wrong with Ptolemy's model is that it did not correctly capture cause and effect. The earth and the planets revolve around the sun due to gravity and not everything revolves around the earth. This was the Copernicus model which he paid gravely for proposing.
It occurs to me that modern society has led to the perspective that we have immense control of our lives. This was not always true in the past where people could die for many reasons out of their control.
The modern understanding of the word 'tragedy' is that it when someone suffers for something that they could have avoided entirely. That there exists this means of control one's destiny and that it was ignored.
We see this play out on a mass scale with our actions in the pandemic (facemasks and vaccinations) and our absence of risk mitigation against climate change. But we remain utterly perplexed as to why people can't see the tragedy that is happening in slow motion?
It is a surprise to many that the math used in physics is a weird kind of handwavy math.
"Quantum field theory is mathematics that has not yet been invented by mathematicians." quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at…
The math in physics is not as rigorous as found in math but it works with extreme accuracy! Maps (i.e. models) are not the territory, but you want your maps to accurately represent the territory.
As Feynman has said "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."