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 Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more