Re: How soon until AI takes over polling?

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on Nov 11, 2020; 4:21pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-soon-until-AI-takes-over-polling-tp7599471p7599478.html

I used to teach a course called "AI and expert systems" for management students at Carnegie Mellon.  I remember that Mycin, a diagnosis system for infectious diseases and one of the most famous expert systems, had some explanation capability.  According to Wikipedia, "At the end, it [Mycin] provided a list of possible culprit bacteria ranked from high to low based on the probability of each diagnosis, its confidence in each diagnosis' probability, the reasoning behind each diagnosis..."

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 9:05 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Nov 11, 2020, at 8:54 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Don't some AI systems include subsystems for explaining their reasoning?

I don’t know how common that is, Frank.  The few people I know who are active and skilled deep-learning practitioners have told me (if I have understood) that it is rare and limited.  I spent some time looking at the zero-shot language translation, as something I wanted to convene at SFI, with the AI goal of unpacking what was the “universal language” internal representation, and with the linguistics goal of using it in cognate classification and historical reconstruction.  Never could get a call-back from any of the google people.  But I didn’t think at the time that zero-shot had been unpacked.

Probably some on this list know much more about the state of play.

Eric

Happy Veterans Day,

Frank

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020, 3:25 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Friam poll:

How soon until classical telephone polling is just gone?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/upshot/polls-what-went-wrong.html

If, as boasted, facebook knows when their users are pregnant before the users know, they know who someone supports and whether that person is likely to vote.  

At this stage, trying to get accurate statistics from cold calls on the phone seems as quixotic as trying to infer something from the people who read books.  But if there’s anything we can count on, it is that the number of people who don’t leave an internet fingerprint is too small to have any political impact at all.

How much effort they put into getting reliable calibrations will depend on what ways they see to monetize it, but the diversity of cash-outs should be nearly inexhaustible, for years to come.

So one more thing goes into what is both a black box and a private rather than public box.  It will take over after the first few times it produces much more reliable results, but since we won’t know what it is based on — AIs don’t explain themselves — we will have no ability to extrapolate out of sample.

Eric

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