Smart Software: A Negative Nancy Viewpoint?

November 8, 2021

Smart software, self learning machines, and artificial intelligence — great stuff. The hitch in the git along are false positives and the recent troubles at Zillow. What happened at Zillow? Here’s one possible idea from an online information service called INO.com:

Zillow halted the purchases of homes using its “Zestimate” and Ibuyer programs, which act as a purchase, renovate, flip-type of market service allowing home sellers to get an almost instant purchase offer from Zillow has raised questions in my mind related to the potential risks involved in owning large quantities of real estate assets in a shifting market.

How did these systems work? Smart software. INO asked:

Could the collapse in Zillow, Redfin, and OpenDoor reflect the underlying risks of an overly aggressive buying/flipping algorithm event?

Investors in Zillow may lack appetite to spend a few minutes reading “Calculations Suggest It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI.” The main point is that smart software might be clever enough to prevent an annoying humanoid from changing how the system operates.

Here’s a passage I noted:

As Turing proved through some smart math, while we can know that for some specific programs, it’s logically impossible to find a way that will allow us to know that for every potential program that could ever be written. That brings us back to AI, which in a super-intelligent state could feasibly hold every possible computer program in its memory at once. Any program written to stop AI harming humans and destroying the world, for example, may reach a conclusion (and halt) or not – it’s mathematically impossible for us to be absolutely sure either way, which means it’s not containable.

The main idea is that software like Zestimate might generate results that are not desirable, the next-generation of AI-infused systems could prevent Zillow’s management from operating.

What are the consequences of smart software which have undetected initial biases or “issues”?

Exciting. Zesty, in fact.

Stephen E Arnold, November 8, 2021

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.