Zuckerberg and Musk Are Fighting About Their Personal Brands, Not AI
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
just making an observation, I had to go back into my browser history to find this when it was recently in the top list and visible.
I think making API calls available for reasons why an algorithm has done this would be helpful in understanding why and how decisions are made.
in relation to this article, I am observing an algorithm making a decision for me that I think I disagree with and I am not delighted about it.
[edit] : to extrapolate on this further, whether either of them is 'right' or 'wrong' I think this is an important conversation to have and design effective means of review now, before we have built complex systems using this foundation and lose understanding of why a machine may make a decision like liquidating all hedges in a hedgefund (read "The Fear Index") or causing a car to turn into oncoming traffic to avoid a deer, being able to have the information readily available for review and improvement is necessary to discuss now... not later.
a horrible analogy I am coming up with now is that the cause of climate change does not matter right now, it is having an immediate impact on people around the globe and we need to take action immediately. (it has impacted my ability to obtain home insurance, I have been denied by every single one except a small one that was recently purchased by geico -- the reason as quoted has been "home is within three miles of the coast line" -- I am on the east coast)
There are algorithms promoting and demoting content too, but afaik they don't have this effect. They either flag posts e.g. if detected as spam (which isn't the case here), or they penalize them, which might push them down to the second or third page, but not remove them from being ranked entirely. A page remaining unflagged but removed from ranking is more unusual, and I think in the past has been manual intervention.
If not, if he just knows what AI professionals in the field today know, and such stealth project doesn't exist, then I really do think he's worrying about "overpopulation on Mars" as Ng put it. Because there are zero indications in publicly available AI research that we are even close to developing AI that can think for itself, we can't even describe how that would work in theory with any certainty (beyond guessing), let alone implement it.
So from that results that Musk isn't in fact doing this for "brand purposes" but because he actually believes AI could be dangerous unless safeguards are put in place, similarly to how someone could say CRISPR is dangerous - unless safeguards are [put in place.