[ExI] One Per Cent: Watson, the supercomputer genius, heads for the cloud

[Anders Sandberg]

On 21/09/2012 21:40, BillK wrote:
> Seems reasonable to me. As the article states, the first area is
> medical diagnosis where trials are producing good results. Watson
> seems to avoid the human biases that doctors have and will produce a
> more correct diagnosis.

The problem is nonhuman biases. This kind of complex system makes 
certain implicit assumptions that can be very subtle, yet affect what it 
does. If there is an obvious performance metric to check that it does 
better than humans it doesn't matter much. But imagine that after a few 
years of use it was discovered that it made more reliable diagnoses for 
members of majority ethnic groups (more data available), or for some 
reason tended to underdiagnose certain diseases in certain people 
according to a complex pattern. There is nothing directly programmed in 
to achieve this, it is just an emergent effect of the machine learning 
algorithm and the existing data.


> I would associate this with another article I read that suggests that
> modern tech is changing human minds. (This may be more applicable to
> the younger generation). He suggests that modern people don't
> understand how things work anymore - they just know how to use the
> technology.

I think that has been the case for a long time. As soon as either the 
mechanism of action is outside normal experience (e.g. electrical 
devices) or the system becomes nontrivial (e.g. a clockwork) most people 
just give up and accept that it works without any attempt at 
understanding. Most Victorians could likely not explain a steam engine.

People who peek into black boxes have always been a minority. Maybe we 
would be better off to ensure that there are more of them (for reasons 
of reliability, democracy, innovation), but in terms of reaping the 
benefits of technology we probably don't need many.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University