Page 154 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

140 Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

process and as an outcome. I characterized these differences as a set of direc-
tional changes:
Deterministic ➔ Probabilistic
Mechanism ➔ Organism
System ➔ Ecosystem
Outcomes ➔ Tendencies
Predefined ➔ Emergent
A colleague, reading this list, responded: “so things are about to get weird,”
and, indeed, they have.
The current Autodesk Virtual Agent is a reasonably helpful bot. It isn’t
1
weird. But more expansive implementations of its type have displayed odd
behavior, most recently Amazon’s Alexa, which developed a habit of laugh-
ing at customers at unpredictable and irregularly repeated intervals from the
Echo home speakers it haunts. Amazon rushed a “fix” into production,
2
explaining only that the behavior was a result of “false positives.” What
is truly weird—aside from the customers’ decidedly creepy experiences—
is that Amazon’s machine-learning experts probably cannot deliver a com-
plete explanation of the phenomenon. Contrast this with other “big data”
systems, which process comparable volumes of data but that do so via fully
deterministic channels, rather than via the recursively nested weightings that
characterize the “natural language processing” that makes Alexa go. For a
computer scientist this is a new model. For an Amazon executive, no doubt
likewise.

8.3 RAISE THEM RIGHT

Though a novelty in the office, the experience of developing a capable oper-
ator by encouragement rather than command was by no means new to me.
Indeed, many people of a certain age have deep experience training mas-
sively complex, opaque-thinking systems from a blank slate to a state of
sophistication. We call it parenting.
As parents we come to recognize the impossibility of knowing how
much of either the credit or blame we deserve for our children’s makeup.
This is in part due to the complexity of the system we are training, but also
in part because we are not the only ones doing the training. There are

1
Try it yourself: https://ava.autodesk.com/.
2
https://www.pcmag.com/news/359719/alexa-is-randomly-laughing-but-nobodys-in-on-the-joke
is the best titled of the many articles on the topic.