Skip to main content

Artificial Intelligence - Melanie Mitchell *****

As Melanie Mitchell makes plain, humans have limitations in their visual abilities, typified by optical illusions, but artificial intelligence (AI) struggles at a much deeper level with recognising what's going on in images. Similarly in some ways, the visual appearance of this book misleads. It's worryingly fat and bears the ascetic light blue cover of the Pelican series, which since my childhood have been markers of books that were worthy but have rarely been readable. This, however, is an excellent book, giving a clear picture of how many AI systems go about their business and the huge problems designers of such systems face.

Not only does Mitchell explain the main approaches clearly, her account is readable and engaging. I read a lot of popular science books, and it's rare that I keep wanting to go back to one when I'm not scheduled to be reading it - this is one of those rare examples.

We discover how AI researchers have achieved the apparently remarkable abilities of, for example, the Go champion AlphaGo, or the Jeopardy! playing Watson. In each case these systems are tightly designed for a particular purpose and arguably have no intelligence in the broad sense.  As for what's probably the most impressively broad AI application of modern times, self-driving cars, Mitchell emphasises how limited they truly are. Like so many AI applications, the hype far exceeds the reality - when companies and individuals talk of self-driving cars being commonplace in a few years' time, it's quite clear that this could only be the case in a tightly controlled environment.

One example, that Mitchell explores in considerable detail are so-called adversarial attacks, a particularly AI form of hacking where, for example, those in the know can make changes to images that are invisible to the human eye but that force an AI system to interpret what they are seeing as something totally different. It's a sobering thought that, for example, by simply applying a small sticker to a stop sign on the road - unnoticeable to a human driver - an adversarial attacker can turn the sign into a speed limit sign as far as an AI system is concerned, with potentially fatal consequences.

Don't get me wrong, Mitchell, a professor of computer science who has specialised in AI, is no AI luddite. But unlike many of the enthusiasts in the field (or, for that matter, those who are terrified AI is about to take over the world), she is able to give us a realistic, balanced view, showing us just how far AI has to go to come close to the more general abilities humans make use of all the time even in simple tasks. AI does a great job, for example, in something like Siri or Google Translate or unlocking a phone with a face - but AI systems still have no concept of, for example, understanding (as opposed to recognising) what is in an image. Mitchell makes it clear that where systems learn from large amounts of data, it is usually impossible to uncover how they are making decisions (which makes the EU's law requiring transparent AI decisions pretty much impossible to implement), so we really shouldn't trust them with important outcomes as they could easily be basing their outcomes on totally irrelevant inputs.

Apart from occasionally finding the explanations of the workings of types of neural network a little hard to follow, the only thing that made me raise an eyebrow was being told that Marvin Minsky 'coined the phrase "suitcase word"' - I would have thought 'derived* the phrase from Lewis Carroll's term "portmanteau word"' would have been closer to reality.

There have been good books on the basics of AI already, and excellent ones on the problems that 'deep learning' and big data systems throw up. But without a doubt, Mitchell's book sets a new standard in giving an understanding of what's possible and how difficult it is to go further. It should be read by every journalist, PR person and politician before they pump out yet more hype on the AI future. Recommended.

* Polite term
Hardback:   

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more