AI: Semi-Capable? Absolutely!
November 20, 2019
Reporter Jeremy Kahn at Fortune ponders an important question—“A.I. Is Everywhere—But Where Is Human Judgment?” Kahn recently spent a week at the Web Summit in Lisbon, where he learned just how much machine learning has taken over at many companies. From product recommendations to delivery-drone operation to the prevention of crime, algorithms are making many real-world decisions. For example, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explained at the conference that machine learning is at the heart of “absolutely everything” at his company. This takeover really took off in 2015, when Amazon took up deep learning and found its forecasts became 15 times more accurate. The article also notes that Mastercard uses predictive analytics to foil cyber attacks and fraudulent activity by organized crime.
After the rah-rah conference, however, Kahn found some sobering news in a report from the National Transportation Safety Board. He writes:
“While Web Summit was all about the promise of A.I., this news from last week ought to give people pause: the National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report investigating how one of Uber’s self-driving cars came to strike and kill 49-year old Elaine Herzberg as she crossed the road in Tempe, Arizona, last year. The NTSB found in its ‘Vehicle Automation Report’ that while the car’s sensors did detect Herzberg six seconds before hitting her, the self-driving system failed to correctly classify her as a pedestrian, in part because Uber had trained its computer vision system to only expect pedestrians in designated cross-walks. What’s more, the agency concluded that Uber’s engineers had programmed the car to only brake or take evasive maneuvers if its computer systems were highly confident that a collision was likely. Humans decided to train the system in this way and set these tolerances. Most likely, this was done to prioritize the comfort of Uber’s passengers, who would have found sudden braking and unexpected swerves annoying and alarming. And it’s ultimately these human decisions that doomed Herzberg.”
The piece concludes with a simple but important suggestion—anyone involved with deploying A.I. with real-world impact should read the NTSB report. That is a good idea.
Cynthia Murrell, November 20, 2019
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