Artificial Intelligence For Dummies
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Humans are used to seeing data for what it is in many cases: an opinion. In fact, in some cases, people skew data to the point where it becomes useless, a mistruth. A computer or AI application can’t tell the difference between truthful and untruthful data — all it sees is data. One of the issues that make it hard, if not impossible, to create an AI that actually thinks like a human is that humans can work with mistruths and computers can’t. The best you can hope to achieve is to see the errant data as outliers and then filter it out, but that technique doesn’t necessarily solve the problem because a human would still use the data and attempt to determine a truth based on the mistruths that are there.

A common thought about creating less contaminated datasets is that instead of allowing humans to enter the data, collecting the data through sensors or other means should be possible. Unfortunately, sensors and other mechanical input methodologies reflect the goals of their human inventors and the limits of what the particular technology is able to detect. Consequently, even machine-derived or sensor-derived data is also subject to generating mistruths that are quite difficult for an AI to detect and overcome.

The following discussion uses a car accident as the main example to illustrate five types of mistruths that can appear in data. The concepts that the accident is trying to portray may not always appear in data and they may appear in different ways than discussed. The fact remains that you normally need to deal with these sorts of things when viewing data.

Mistruths of Commission

Mistruths of commission are those that reflect an outright attempt to substitute truthful information for untruthful information. For example, when filling out an accident report, someone could state that the sun momentarily blinded them, making it impossible to see someone they hit. In reality, perhaps the person was distracted by something else or wasn’t actually thinking about driving (possibly considering a nice dinner). If no one can disprove this theory, the person might get by with a lesser charge. However, the point is that the data would also be contaminated. The effect is that now an insurance company would base premiums on errant data.

Although it would seem as if mistruths of commission are completely avoidable, often they aren’t. Human tell “little white lies” to save others embarrassment or to deal with an issue with the least amount of personal effort. Sometimes a mistruth of commission is based on errant input or hearsay. In fact, the sources for errors of commission are so many that it really is hard to come up with a scenario where someone could avoid them entirely. All this said, mistruths of commission are one type of mistruth that someone can avoid more often than not.

Mistruths of Omission

Mistruths of omission are those where a person tells the truth in every stated fact but leaves out an important fact that would change the perception of an incident as a whole. Thinking again about the accident report, say that someone strikes a deer, causing significant damage to their car. He truthfully says that the road was wet; it was near twilight so the light wasn’t as good as it could be; he was a little late in pressing on the brake; and the deer simply ran out from a thicket at the side of the road. The conclusion would be that the incident is simply an accident.

However, the person has left out an important fact. He was texting at the time. If law enforcement knew about the texting, it would change the reason for the accident to inattentive driving. The driver might be fined and the insurance adjuster would use a different reason when entering the incident into the database. As with the mistruth of commission, the resulting errant data would change how the insurance company adjusts premiums.

Avoiding mistruths of omission is nearly impossible. Yes, someone could purposely leave facts out of a report, but it’s just as likely that someone will simply forget to include all the facts. After all, most people are quite rattled after an accident, so it’s easy to lose focus and report only those truths that left the most significant impression. Even if a person later remembers additional details and reports them, the database is unlikely to ever contain a full set of truths.

Mistruths of Perspective

Mistruths of perspective occur when multiple parties view an incident from multiple vantage points. For example, in considering an accident involving a struck pedestrian, the person driving the car, the person getting hit by the car, and a bystander who witnessed the event would all have different perspectives. An officer taking reports from each person would understandably get different facts from each one, even assuming that each person tells the truth as each knows it. In fact, experience shows that this is almost always the case and what the officer submits as a report is the middle ground of what each of those involved state, augmented by personal experience. In other words, the report will be close to the truth, but not close enough for an AI.

When dealing with perspective, it’s important to consider vantage point. The driver of the car can see the dashboard and knows the car’s condition at the time of the accident. This is information that the other two parties lack. Likewise, the person getting hit by the car has the best vantage point for seeing the driver’s facial expression (intent). The bystander might be in the best position to see whether the driver made an attempt to stop and assess issues such as whether the driver tried to swerve. Each party will have to make a report based on seen data without the benefit of hidden data.

Perspective is perhaps the most dangerous of the mistruths because anyone who tries to derive the truth in this scenario will, at best, end up with an average of the various stories, which will never be fully correct. A human viewing the information can rely on intuition and instinct to potentially obtain a better approximation of the truth, but an AI will always use just the average, which means that the AI is always at a significant disadvantage. Unfortunately, avoiding mistruths of perspective is impossible because no matter how many witnesses you have to the event, the best you can hope to achieve is an approximation of the truth, not the actual truth.

There is also another sort of mistruth to consider, and it’s one of perspective. Think about this scenario: You’re a deaf person in 1927. Each week, you go to the theater to view a silent film, and for an hour or more, you feel like everyone else. You can experience the movie the same way everyone else does; there are no differences. In October of that year, you see a sign saying that the theater is upgrading to support a sound system so that it can display talkies — films with a sound track. The sign says that it’s the best thing ever, and almost everyone seems to agree, except for you, the deaf person, who is now made to feel like a second-class citizen, different from everyone else and even pretty much excluded from the theater. In the deaf person’s eyes, that sign is a mistruth; adding a sound system is the worst possible thing, not the best possible thing. The point is that what seems to be generally true isn’t actually true for everyone. The idea of a general truth — one that is true for everyone — is a myth. It doesn’t exist.

Mistruths of Bias

Mistruths of bias occur when someone is able to see the truth, but due to personal concerns or beliefs is unable to actually see it. For example, when thinking about an accident, a driver might focus attention so completely on the middle of the road that the deer at the edge of the road becomes invisible. Consequently, the driver has no time to react when the deer suddenly decides to bolt out into the middle of the road in an effort to cross.

A problem with bias is that it can be incredibly hard to categorize. For example, a driver who fails to see the deer can have a genuine accident, meaning that the deer was hidden from view by shrubbery. However, the driver might also be guilty of inattentive driving because of incorrect focus. The driver might also experience a momentary distraction. In short, the fact that the driver didn’t see the deer isn’t the question; instead, it’s a matter of why the driver didn’t see the deer. In many cases, confirming the source of bias becomes important when creating an algorithm designed to avoid a bias source.

Theoretically, avoiding mistruths of bias is always possible. In reality, however, all humans have biases of various types and those biases will always result in mistruths that skew datasets. Just getting someone to actually look and then see something — to have it register in the person’s brain — is a difficult task. Humans rely on filters to avoid information overload, and these filters are also a source of bias because they prevent people from actually seeing things.

Frame of reference

Of the five mistruths, frame of reference need not actually be the result of any sort of error, but one of understanding. A frame-of-reference mistruth occurs when one party describes something, such as an event like an accident, and because a second party lacks experience with the event, the details become muddled or completely misunderstood. Comedy routines abound that rely on frame-of-reference errors. One famous example is from Abbott and Costello, Who’s On First?. Getting one person to understand what a second person is saying can be impossible when the first person lacks experiential knowledge — the frame of reference.

Another frame-of-reference mistruth example occurs when one party can’t possibly understand the other. For example, a sailor experiences a storm at sea. Perhaps it’s a monsoon but assume for a moment that the storm is substantial — perhaps life threatening. Even with the use of videos, interviews, and a simulator, the experience of being at sea in a life-threatening storm would be impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced such a storm first hand; that person has no frame of reference.

The best way to avoid frame-of-reference mistruths is to ensure that all parties involved can develop similar frames of reference. To accomplish this task, the various parties require similar experiential knowledge to ensure the accurate transfer of data from one person to another. However, when working with a dataset, which is necessarily recorded, static data, frame-of-reference errors will still occur when the prospective viewer lacks the required experiential knowledge.

An AI will always experience frame-of-reference issues because an AI necessarily lacks the ability to create an experience. A databank of acquired knowledge isn’t quite the same thing. The databank would contain facts, but experience is based on not only facts but also conclusions that current technology is unable to duplicate.

About This Article

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About the book authors:

John Mueller has produced 114 books and more than 600 articles on topics ranging from functional programming techniques to working with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Luca Massaron, a Google Developer Expert (GDE),??interprets big data and transforms it into smart data through simple and effective data mining and machine learning techniques.

John Mueller has produced 114 books and more than 600 articles on topics ranging from functional programming techniques to working with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Luca Massaron, a Google Developer Expert (GDE),??interprets big data and transforms it into smart data through simple and effective data mining and machine learning techniques.

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