Skip to main content

The AI Delusion - Gary Smith *****

This is a very important little book ('little' isn't derogatory - it's just quite short and in a small format) - it gets to the heart of the problem with applying artificial intelligence techniques to large amounts of data and thinking that somehow this will result in wisdom.

 Gary Smith as an economics professor who teaches statistics, understands numbers and, despite being a self-confessed computer addict, is well aware of the limitations of computer algorithms and big data. What he makes clear here is that we forget at our peril that computers do not understand the data that they process, and as a result are very susceptible to GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Yet we are increasingly dependent on computer-made decisions coming out of black box algorithms which mine vast quantities of data to find correlations and use these to make predictions. What's wrong with this? We don't know how the algorithms are making their predictions - and the algorithms don't know the difference between correlation and causality.

 The scientist's (and statistician's) mantra is often 'correlation is not causality.' What this means is that if we have two things happening in the world we choose to measure - let's call them A (it could be banana imports) and B (it could number of pregnancies in the country) and if B rises and falls as A does, it doesn't mean that B is caused by A. It could be that A is caused B, A and B are both caused by C, or it's just a random coincidence. The banana import/pregnancy correlation actually happened in the UK for a number of years after the second world war. Human statisticians would never think the pregnancies were caused by banana imports - but an algorithm would not know any better.

 In the banana case there was probably a C linking the two, but because modern data mining systems handle vast quantities of data and look at hundreds or thousands of variables, it is almost inevitable that they will discover apparent links between two sets of information where the coincidence is totally random. The correlation happens to work for the data being mined, but is totally useless for predicting the future. 

 This is the thesis at the heart of this book. Smith makes four major points that really should be drummed into all stock traders, politicians, banks, medics, social media companies... and anyone else who is tempted to think that letting a black box algorithm loose on vast quantities of data will make useful predictions. First, there are patterns in randomness. Given enough values, totally random data will have patterns embedded within it - it's easy to assume that these have a meaning, but they don't. Second, correlation is not causality. Third, cherry picking is dangerous. Often these systems pick the bits of the data that work and ignore the bits that don't - an absolute no-no in proper analysis. And finally, data without theory is treacherous. You need to have a theory and test it against the data - if you try to derive the theory from the data with no oversight, it will always fit that data, but is very unlikely to be correct.

 My only problems with book is that Smith insists for some reason on making databases two words ('data bases' - I know, not exactly terrible), and the book can feel a bit repetitious because most of it consists of repeated examples of how the four points above lead AI systems to make terrible predictions - from Hillary Clinton's system mistakenly telling her team where to focus canvassing effort to the stock trading systems produced by 'quants'. But I think that repetition is important here because it shows just how much we are under the sway of these badly thought-out systems - and how much we need to insist that algorithms that affect our lives are transparent and work from knowledge, not through data mining. 

 As Smith points out, we regularly hear worries that AI systems are going to get so clever that they will take over the world. But actually the big problem is that our AI systems are anything but intelligent: 'In the age of Big Data, the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and therefore trust computers to make important decisions for us.’

 This should be big-selling book. A plea to the publisher: change the cover (it just looks like it's badly printed and smudged) and halve the price to give it wider appeal. 

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more