TALAMANA · A ROUTE · CURIOUS MINDS

Why machines can be confident and wrong

8 ideas, in order. about 18 minutes of listening. Understand one mechanism, detect one failure mode, verify one output.

The route

  1. AI is already in your day — Your phone, spell-check and feed are already making small choices for you.
  2. Everything it knows is data — To the machine a picture, a word and a song are all numbers that people collected.
  3. Machines learn from examples — The examples are the teacher, so bad examples teach badly.
  4. Chance, and how to name it — A number between 0 and 1 names chance, and machines run on it.
  5. Every output is a draw — Judging a tool by one output is like judging a die by one roll.
  6. Machines get things wrong — A machine gives a wrong answer as fast and neatly as a right one.
  7. Confident is not correct — Confidence is a property of the writing, not evidence about the world.
  8. Weigh where the answer came from — Find a second source that does not copy the first, and ask what each could know.

Take this route on the map · Curious Minds · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India.

Age grows from 11 at the centre to 22 at the edge, and six sectors show the learning strands. Tab into the map and the arrow keys step from idea to idea, following the links where there is one. Enter opens the idea under the cursor, and E reads out its links and the reason recorded on each. Press slash for Search, question mark for the full key list, and Escape to leave. Open Ideas for the complete readable list, including what each idea builds on and what it opens up.

LOGIKA · RBDS AI LAB INDIA
ON-RAMP · AGE 11 · FIRST ENCOUNTERS, NOT GATES — IDEAS · — DEPENDENCIES
DONE
OPENS NEXT
SOLID — STANDS ON