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Showing posts from September, 2018

Eagerness to use an immature technology: Humans have a habit of trusting algorithms without troubling themselves to think about consequences

From WSJ: Don’t Believe the Algorithm: Blind faith in machines (and machine learning) has left us vulnerable to biased and incoherent AI. The solution? A healthy dose of skepticism and human oversight. The mathematican who wrote the WSJ artucle had the following suggestion: "USE ‘MAGIC’ TO SPOT BOGUS ALGORITHMS -- Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, replace buzzwords like “machine learning,” “artificial intelligence” and “neural network” with the word “magic.” Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that something smells like bull—. Because I’m afraid—long into the foreseeable future—we’re not going to “solve world hunger with magic” or “use magic to write the perfect screenplay” any more than we are with AI." References: Don’t Believe the Algorithm , WSJ.