Making AI Stand The Test Of Time
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The kind of benchmark that IT normally worries about isn't without importance. How fast a particular data set is learned, how quickly prompts can be processed, what resources are required and how it all scales? If you're creating an AI system as part of your business, you'd better get those things right, or at the least understand their bounds.
They don't much matter otherwise, although you can be sure marketing and pundits will disagree. The fact it doesn't matter is a good thing: benchmarks too often become targets that distort function, and they should be kept firmly in their kennels.
The most important benchmark for AI is how truthful it is or, more usefully, how little it is misrepresented by those who sell or use it. As Pontius Pilate was said to have said 2,000 years ago, what is truth? There is no benchmark. Despite the intervening millennia and infinite claims to have fixed this, there still isn't. The most egregious of liars can command the support of nations in the midst of what should be a golden age of reason. If nobody's prepared or able to stop them, what chance have we got to keep AI on the side of the angels?
The one mechanism that's in with a chance is that curious synthesis of regulatory bodies and judicial systems which exists - in theory - outside politics but inside democratic control. Regulators set standards, the courts act as backstop to those powers and adjudicators of disputes.
[...] Which takes us to the regulators. It should be that the more technical and measurable the field being regulated, the easier the regulator's job is. If you're managing the radio spectrum or the railways, something going wrong shows up quickly in the numbers. Financial regulators, operating in the miasma of capital economics and corporate misdirection, go through a cycle of being weakened in the name of strong growth until everything falls apart and a grand reset follows. Wince and repeat. Yet very technical regulators can go wrong, as with the FAA and Boeing's 737 MAX. Regulatory capture by their industries or the politicians is a constant threat. And sometimes we just can't tell - GDPR has been with us for five years. Is it working?
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