Wednesday, 26 December 2018

Artificial Intelligence has all the rigour of Alchemy (2018)


In what some people might see as 'news', and others see as a statement of the screamingly obvious, Science magazine reports that some AI researchers are concerned that Artificial Intelligence has now achieved the status of alchemy (which the Merriam Webster dictionary helpfully defines as 'a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.')

The AI researcher who has blown the whistle is Ali Rahimi, who is concerned that researchers do not know why some algorithms work and others don't, nor do they have rigorous criteria for choosing one AI architecture over another. 

Ho-hum.

Science article HERE. Cited paper HERE