Algorithms – AI in Media and Society

What is a stop sign? What is a person?

April 16, 2023 Mindy McAdams

I was reading an article in Scientific American, found by one of my students, and I came across this passage:

“A Tesla on autopilot recently drove directly toward a human worker carrying a stop sign in the middle of the road, slowing down only when the human driver intervened. The system could recognize humans on their own (which is how they appeared in the training data) and stop signs in their usual locations (as they appeared in the training images) but failed to slow down when confronted by the unfamiliar combination of the two, which put the stop sign in a new and unusual position.”
—Artificial General Intelligence Is Not as Imminent as You Might Think, July 1, 2022 (boldface mine)

The article helpfully linked to a YouTube video, in which we see and hear the situation. The driver is narrating as the car makes its decisions: “All right, we’re having to take over. It’s not slowing early enough. [Pause.] Yep, the car keeps trying to go each time … That’s really unfortunate. It sees the person, it sees the stop sign, but it’s almost not taking it seriously.”

View through a car's windshield shows a person holding a stop sign, standing in the middle of a road — *Capture from the YouTube video at 03:14*

This is not a big surprise if you understand the nature of training data and the long tail — a person walking across a street is common enough, and a stop sign is very common, but a person holding a stop sign and standing (not walking) in the middle of the lane occurs much less frequently than the other two. It’s not rare, but it’s not something we encounter every day while driving.

Here’s the thing: Later in the article, the author says: “You can’t deal with a person carrying a stop sign if you don’t really understand what a stop sign even is.” And at first, I’m like: Cool, cool. That’s good, that’s a nice observation.

And then I thought: Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Of course an AI system understands nothing, nothing at all. It has been trained to recognize a stop sign. It has been trained to recognize a human (especially a human in the road). But what is really happening in the video? The car is stopping, briefly, and then starting up again. It does this more than once. The driver has to intervene, put a foot on the brake, to stop the car from going forward and hitting the person. The car is behaving the way it was programmed to behave at a stop sign — and not the way it was programmed to behave if a human is walking in front of the car.

The central point here is not that the car’s system doesn’t know what a stop sign is (which, it’s true, it doesn’t). The central point is that given a human holding a stop sign, the system behavior governing a regular, side-of-the-road stop sign has dominated, has come to the fore as the default behavior — and the system behavior that prevents a human from being run over is not in play.

This is no trolley problem. The car’s AI did not decide to kill the human. It did not weigh the options. In an unlikely case (an edge case), it defaulted to the common, everyday case: There is a stop sign. This is what I do when there is a stop sign.

I’m blogging this because this is great discussion material for students and others!

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Machine learning models, explained

October 22, 2021October 22, 2021 Mindy McAdams

A quick post to remind myself of this article: All Machine Learning Models Explained in 6 Minutes (2020).

Here is an outline:

Supervised learning
- Regression
  - Linear regression
  - Decision tree
  - Random forest
  - Neural network
- Classification
  - Logistic regression
  - Support vector machine
  - Naive Bayes
Unsupervised learning
- Clustering: “Techniques include k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, mean shift clustering, and density-based clustering”
- Dimensionality reduction: “Most dimensionality-reduction techniques can be categorized as either feature elimination or feature extraction”

Reinforcement learning is not mentioned in the post.

To get your hands dirty with these models, look at scikit-learn — a Python library.

I also found this mildly interesting: The Machine Learning Process in 7 Steps (2021). It’s very brief.

Explaining common misconceptions about AI

August 27, 2021August 27, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Sometimes people make a statement that an artificial intelligence system is a computer system that learns, or that learns on its own.

That is inaccurate. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, not the whole field. Machine learning systems are computer systems that learn from data. Other AI systems do not. Various systems are wholly programmed by humans to follow explicit rules and do not generate any code or instructions on their own.

The error probably arises from the fact that many of the exciting advances in AI since 2012 have involved some form of machine learning.

The recent successes of machine learning have much to do with neural networks, each of which is a system of algorithms that (in some respects) mimics the way neurons work in the brains of humans and other animals — but only in some respects. In other words, a neural network shares some features with human brains, but is not extremely similar to a human brain in all its complexity.

Advances in neural networks have been made possible not only by new algorithms (written by humans) but also by new computer hardware that did not exist in the earlier decades of AI development. The main advance concerns graphical processing units, commonly called GPUs. If you’ve noticed how computer games have evolved from simple flat pixel blocks (e.g. Pac-Man) to vast 3D worlds through which the player can fly or run at high speed, turning in different directions to view vast new landscapes, you can extrapolate how the advanced hardware has increased the speed of processing of graphical information by many orders of magnitude.

Without today’s GPUs, you can’t create a neural network that runs multiple algorithms in parallel fast enough to achieve the amazing things that AI systems have achieved. To be clear, the GPUs are just engines, powering the code that creates a neural network.

More about the role of GPUs in today’s AI: Computational Power and the Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence (2018), by Tim Hwang.

Another reason why AI has leapt onto the public stage recently is Big Data. Headlines alerted us to the existence and importance of Big Data a few years ago, and it’s tied to AI because how else could we process that ginormous quantity of data? If all we were doing with Big Data was adding sums, well, that’s no big deal. What businesses and governments and the military really want from Big Data, though, is insights. Predictions. They want to analyze very, very large datasets and discover information there that helps them control populations, make greater profits, manage assets, etc.

Big Data became available to businesses, governments, the military, etc., because so much that used to be stored on paper is now digital. As the general population embraced digital devices for everyday use (fitness, driving cars, entertainment, social media), we contributed even more data than we ever had before.

Very large language models (an aspect of AI that contributes to Google Translate, automatic subtitles on YouTube videos, and more) are made possible by very, very large collections of text that are necessary to train those models. Something I read recently that made an impression on me: For languages that do not have such extensive text corpuses, it can be difficult or even impossible to train an effective model. The availability of a sufficiently enormous amount of data is a prerequisite for creating much of the AI we hear and read about today.

If you ever wonder where all the data comes from — don’t forget that a lot of it comes from you and me, as we use our digital devices.

Perhaps the biggest misconception about AI is that machines will soon become as intelligent as humans, or even more intelligent than all of us. As a common feature in science fiction books and movies, the idea of a super-intelligent computer or robot holds a rock-solid place in our minds — but not in the real world. Not a single one of the AI systems that have achieved impressive results is actually intelligent in the way humans (even baby humans!) are intelligent.

The difference is that we learn from experience, and we are driven by curiosity and the satisfaction we get from experiencing new things — from not being bored. Every AI system is programmed to perform particular tasks on the data that is fed to it. No AI system can go and find new kinds of data. No AI system even has a desire to do so. If a system is given a new kind of data — say, we feed all of Wikipedia’s text to a face-recognition AI system — it has no capability to produce meaningful outputs from that new kind of input.

Book notes: Hello World, by Hannah Fry

June 5, 2021 Mindy McAdams

I finished reading this book back in April, and I’d like to revisit it before I read a couple of new books I just got. This was published in 2018, but that’s no detriment. The author, Hannah Fry, is a “mathematician, science presenter and all-round badass,” according to her website. She’s also a professor at University College London. Her bio at UCL says: “She was trained as a mathematician with a first degree in mathematics and theoretical physics, followed by a PhD in fluid dynamics.”

The complete title, Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, doesn’t sound like this is a book about artificial intelligence. She refers to control, and “the boundary between controller and controlled,” from the very first pages, and this reflects the link between “just” talking about algorithms and talking about AI. Software is made of algorithms, and AI is made of software, so there we go.

In just over 200 pages and seven chapters simply titled Power, Data, Justice, Medicine, Cars, Crime, and Art, this author organizes primary areas of concern for the question of “Are we in control?” and provides examples in each area.

Power. I felt disappointed when I saw this chapter starts with Deep Blue beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 — but my spirits soon lifted as I saw how she framed this example as the way we perceive a computer system affects how we interact with it (shades of Sherry Turkle and Reeves & Nass). She discusses machine learning and image recognition here, briefly. She talks about people trusting GPS map directions and search engines. She explains a 2012 ACLU lawsuit involving Medicaid assistance, bad code, and unwarranted trust in code. Intuition tells us when something seems “off,” and that’s a critical difference between us and the machines.

Algorithms “are what makes computer science an actual science.”
—Hannah Fry, p. 8

Data. Sensibly, this chapter begins with Facebook and the devil’s bargain most of us have made in giving away our personal information. Fry talks about the first customer loyalty cards at supermarkets. The pregnant teenager/Target story is told. In explaining how data brokers operate, Fry describes how companies buy access to you via your interests and your past behaviors (not only online). She summarizes a 2017 DEFCON presentation that showed how supposedly anonymous browsing data is easily converted into real names, and the dastardly Cambridge Analytica exploit. I especially liked how she explains how small the effects of newsfeed manipulation are likely to be (based on research) and then adds — a small margin might be enough to win an election. This chapter wraps up with China’s citizen rating system (Black Mirror in reality) and the toothlessness of GDPR.

Justice. First up is inequality in sentences for crimes, using two U.K. examples. Fry then surveys studies where multiple judges ruled on the same hypothetical cases and inconsistencies abounded. Then the issues with sentencing guidelines (why judges need to be able to exercise discretion). So we arrive at calculating the probability that a person will “re-offend”: the risk assessment. Fry includes a nice, simple decision-tree graphic here. She neatly explains the idea of combining multiple decision trees into an ensemble, used to average the results of all the trees (the random forest algorithm is one example). More examples from research; the COMPAS product and the 2016 ProPublica investigation. This leads to a really nice discussion of bias (pp. 65–71 in the U.S. paperback edition).

Medicine. Although image recognition was mentioned very briefly earlier, here Fry gets more deeply into the topic, starting off with the idea of pattern recognition — and what pattern, exactly, is being recognized? Classifying and detecting anomalies in biopsy slides doesn’t have perfect results when humans do it, so this is one of the promising frontiers for machine learning. Fry describes neural networks here. She gets into specifics about a system trained to detect breast cancer. But image recognition is not necessarily the killer app for medical diagnosis. Fry describes a study of 678 nuns (which previously I’d never heard about) in which it was learned that essays the nuns had written before taking vows could be used to predict which nuns would have dementia later in life. The idea is that an analysis of more data about women (not only their mammograms) could be a better predictor of malignancy.

“Even when our detailed medical histories are stored in a single place (which they often aren’t), the data itself can take so many forms that it’s virtually impossible to connect … in a way that’s useful to an algorithm.”
—Hannah Fry, p. 103

The Medicine chapter also mentions IBM Watson; challenges with labeling data; diabetic retinopathy; lack of coordination among hospitals, doctor’s offices, etc., that lead to missed clues; privacy of medical records. Fry zeroes in on DNA data in particular, noting that all those “find your ancestors” companies now have a goldmine of data to work with. Fry ends with a caution about profit — whatever medical systems might be developed in the future, there will always be people who stand to gain and others who will lose.

Cars. I’m a little burnt out of the topic of self-driving cars, having already read a lot about them. I liked that Fry starts with DARPA and the U.S. military’s longstanding interest in autonomous vehicles. I can’t agree with her that “the future of transportation is driverless” (p. 115). After discussing LiDAR and the flaws of GPS and conflicting signals from different systems in one car, Fry takes a moment to explain Bayes’ theorem, saying it “offers a systematic way to update your belief in a hypothesis on the basis of evidence,” and giving a nice real-world example of probabilistic inference. And of course, the trolley problem. She brings up something I don’t recall seeing before: Humans are going to prank autonomous vehicles. That opens a whole ‘nother box of trouble. Her anecdote under the heading “The company baby” leads to a warning: Always flying on autopilot can have unintended consequences when the time comes to fly manually.

Crime. This chapter begins with a compelling anecdote, followed by a neat historical case from France in the 1820s, and then turns to predictive policing and all its woes. I hadn’t read about the balance between the buffer zone and distance decay in tracking serial criminals, so that was interesting — it’s called the geoprofiling algorithm. I also didn’t know about Jack Maple, a New York City police officer, and his “Charts of the Future” depicting stations of the city’s subway system, which evolved into a data tool named CompStat. I enjoyed learning what burglaries and earthquakes have in common. And then — PredPol. There have been thousands of articles about this since its debut in 2011, as Fry points out. Her summary of the issues related to how police use predictive policing data is quite good, compact and clear. PredPol is one specific product, and not the only one. It is, Fry says, “a proprietary algorithm, so the code isn’t available to the public and no one knows exactly how it works” (p. 157).

“The [PredPol] algorithm can’t actually tell the future. … It can only predict the risk of future events, not the events themselves — and that’s a subtle but important difference.”
—Hannah Fry, p. 153

Face recognition is covered in the Crime chapter, which makes perfect sense. Fry offers a case where a white man was arrested based on incorrect identification of him from CCTV footage at a bank robbery. The consequences of being the person arrested by police can be injury or death, as we all know — not to mention the legal expenses as you try to clear your name after the erroneous arrest. Even though accuracy rates are rising, the chances that you will match a face that isn’t yours remains worrying.

“How do you decide on that trade-off between privacy and protection, fairness and safety?”
—Hannah Fry, p. 172

Art. Here we have “a famous experiment” I’d never heard of — Music Lab, where thousands of music fans logged into a music player app, listened to songs, rated them, and chose what to download (back when we downloaded music). The results showed that for all but the very best and very worst songs, the ratings by other people had a huge influence on what was downloaded in different segments of the app. A song that became a massive hit in one “world” was dead and buried in another. This leads us to recommendation engines such as those used by Netflix and Amazon. Predicting how well movies would do at the box office, turned out to be badly unreliable. The trouble is the lack of an objective measure of quality — it’s not “This is cancer/This is not cancer.” Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that. A recommendation engine is different because it’s not using a quality score — it’s matching similarity. You liked these 10 movies; I like eight of those; chances are I might like the other two.

Fry goes on to discuss programs that create original (or seemingly original) works of art. A system may produce a new musical or visual composition, but it doesn’t come from any emotional basis. It doesn’t indicate a desire to communicate with others, to touch them in any way.

In her Conclusion, Fry returns to the questions about bias, fairness, mistaken identity, privacy — and the idea of the control we give up when we trust the algorithms. People aren’t perfect, and neither are algorithms. Taking the human consequences of machine errors into account at every stage is a step toward accountability. Building in the capability to backtrack and explain decisions, predictions, outputs, is a step toward transparency.

For details about categories of algorithms based on tasks they perform (prioritization, classification, association, filtering; rule-based vs. machine learning), see the Power chapter (pp. 8–13 in the U.S. paperback edition).

Summary of the challenges facing algorithms, AI

June 1, 2021May 30, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Hayden Field, a technology journalist at Morning Brew, published a series of articles about algorithms and AI earlier this year, and they’ve been on my TBR list.

First up was Nine Experts on the Single Biggest Obstacle Facing AI and Algorithms in the Next Five Years. Experts: Drago Anguelov (Waymo); Kathy Baxter (Salesforce); David Cox (IBM Watson); Natasha Crampton (Microsoft); Mark Diaz (Ethical AI at Google); Charles Isbell (professor and dean, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology); Peter Lofgren (Stripe); Andrew Ng (co-founder and former head, Google Brain); Cathy O’Neil (author, Weapons of Math Destruction).

Predictably, ethics was noted as a big challenge — O’Neil asked what we will do about unfairness in decisions made by algorithms. Diaz pointed to the need for involving “experts from a wide range of disciplines, including non-technical disciplines,” in the development process, long before an end product emerges. This intersects with ethics and fairness, as the absence of experts and stakeholders opens the door wide to omissions and errors. Baxter was explicit about systemic racism that is embedded in both training data and models. She listed “medical care decisions, hiring recommendations, access to housing and social programs, visa application approvals, school exam results, hate speech detection, dynamic pricing algorithms for ride hailing services, and even dating apps” — as well as face recognition and predictive policing.

“In essence, problems that are not purely technical require solutions that are not purely technical.”
—Mark Diaz, Ethical AI at Google

Isbell spoke of systematic solutions that can be widely applied. “We cannot treat minority groups as exceptions and edge cases,” he said. Cox highlighted transparency and explainability, as well as ethics and bias. He also alluded to adversarial attacks as well as the non-adversarial errors that surprise researchers (possibly due to overfitting). He grouped all this under trust. Crampton also focused on fairness and referred to diversity in teams, similar to Diaz’s and Isbell’s concerns.

Anguelov explained the need for reliable simulations so that systems can scale up to real-world use. He’s talking about the Long Tail problem: the real world throws up too many unexpected situations. Simulations allow testing in ways that don’t risk human lives (think self-driving cars). Lofgren also talked about scale, but in terms of personalization — his example is detecting credit card fraud in real-time based on Big Data that detects abusing IP addresses and then drills down to the individual cards being used. Ng talked about the difficulty in making dependable commercial AI products — basically off-the-shelf solutions.

“We will often need to make hard decisions based on competing priorities, including decisions to not build or deploy a system for certain purposes.”
—Natasha Crampton, Microsoft

Second in the series is titled Amex’s Fraud Detection AI Was Ready to Go Live. Then Covid Hit. This article starts with the idea that large AI models in the field will still need adjustments as unforeseen problems crop up. This echos the concerns about scale raised by Anguelov and Lofgren in the first article in the series.

The challenge thrown by COVID-19 was that all existing models had been developed and adjusted in a non-pandemic world. Then the world changed.

Amex’s fraud-detecting systems are a blend of old-school rule-based systems and newer machine learning techniques. A team of about 30 decision scientists monitors the system round-the-clock and updates it when necessary, at least once a year. The pandemic came at a bad time for Amex, just as they were rolling out a new model.

“Since each generation of a gradient-boosting ML model is typically developed on data from earlier that same year, many of the model’s assumptions no longer made sense” in 2020.
—”Amex’s Fraud Detection AI Was Ready to Go Live. Then Covid Hit”

This is a really interesting article — although I’d read others about issues caused for AI models by pandemic changes, most of those had to do with either healthcare or travel.

Because of increased online traffic in 2020 — more people online, every day, as the pandemic drove work-from-home and stay-at-home schooling — demands on Amazon Web Services (providing servers and processing power to millions of commercial clients such as Amex) grew enormously. This “dwindling cloud capacity” meant testing new solutions for Amex’s model took much longer than usual. The team had to run new simulations that took our new way of life into account, and those simulations required lots of processor juice.

In the end, Amex’s rollout was successful — but it came months later than originally planned. This was a really neat case study and could be discussed in a lot of different contexts.

I’m going to look at the other articles in the series in tomorrow’s post.

Image recognition in medicine: MS subtypes

April 13, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Machine learning systems for image recognition aren’t always perfect — and neither are AI systems marketed for medical use, whether they use image recognition or not. But here’s an example of image recognition used in a medical context where the system appears to have succeeded at something significant — and it’s something humans can’t do, or at least can’t do well.

“Researchers used the AI tool Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) to scan the MRI brain scans of 6,322 patients with MS, letting SuStaIn train itself unsupervised. The AI identified 3 previously unknown patterns …” (Pharmacy Times). The model was then tested on MRIs from “a separate independent cohort of 3,068 patients” and successfully identified the three new MS subtypes in them.

Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) was introduced in this 2018 paper. It is an “unsupervised machine-learning technique that identifies population subgroups with common patterns of disease progression” using MRI images. The original researchers were studying dementia.

Why does it matter? Identifying the subtype of the disease multiple sclerosis (MS) enables doctors to pursue different treatments for them, which might lead to better results for patients.

“While further clinical studies are needed, there was a clear difference, by subtype, in patients’ response to different treatments and in accumulation of disability over time. This is an important step towards predicting individual responses to therapies,” said Dr. Arman Eshaghi, the lead researcher (EurekAlert).

Sources: Artificial Intelligence Weekly newsletter, from The Wall Street Journal; Pharmacy Times; EurekAlert.

AI building blocks: What are algorithms?

October 12, 2020June 3, 2021 Mindy McAdams

In thinking about how to teach non–computer science students about AI, I’ve been considering what fundamental concepts they need to understand. I was thinking about models and how to explain them. My searches led me to this 8-minute BBC video: What exactly is an algorithm?

I’ve explained algorithms to journalism students in the past — usually I default to the “a set of instructions” definition and leave it at that. What I admire about this upbeat, lively video is not just that it goes well beyond that simple explanation but also that it brings in experts to talk about how various and wide-ranging algorithms are.

The young presenter, Jon Stroud, starts out with no clue what algorithms are. He begins with some web searching and finds Victoria Nash, of the Oxford Internet Institute, who provides the “it’s like a recipe” definition. Then he gets up off his butt and visits the Oxford Internet Institute, where Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow, gives Stroud a tour of the server room and a fuller explanation.

“Algorithms calculate based on a bunch of features, the sort of things that will put something at the top of the list and then something at the bottom of the list.”
—Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

He meets up with Isabel Maccabee at Northcoders, a U.K. coding school, and participates in a fun little drone-flying competition with an algorithm.

“The person writing the code could have written an error, and that’s where problems can arise, but the computer doesn’t make mistakes. It just does what it’s supposed to do.”
—Isabel Maccabee, Northcoders

Stroud also visits Allison Gardner, of Women Leading in AI, to talk about deskilling and the threats and benefits of computers in general.

This video provides an enjoyable introduction with plenty of ideas for follow-up discussion. It provides a nice grounding that includes the fact that not everything powerful about computer technology is AI!

How to start learning about algorithms

September 22, 2020June 3, 2021 Mindy McAdams

After writing yesterday’s post, I was thinking about how much students should know about algorithms if they are to have a basic understanding of how AI works. Is it enough to tell them an algorithm is a set of instructions?

So I turned, as I often do, to Khan Academy — a free online learning site that often helps me through my lack of a mathematics background. I found a set of three short lessons, starting with a video.

In the introductory video, “What is an algorithm and why should you care?”, we see various practical uses of algorithms, followed by the statement above, and a brief description of how route finding works — what Google Maps does when it gives you directions. Route finding is often used as an example of accepting a “good enough” output for the sake of speed (that is, efficiency).

Watching the animation, we comprehend that the computer is following a set of instructions to determine a good route for a delivery truck with 25 stops to make. We see the process of the algorithm at work, rather than seeing formulas and equations.

I love that the video also shows us, with animation, how the efficiency of an algorithm is calculated.

The second lesson, “A guessing game,” demonstrates binary search (an algorithm) by allowing you to discover it interactively. Wonderful!

The third lesson, “Route-finding,” is much more reading intensive. It explains the algorithm in terms of solving a maze. Without knowing the exact path to solve the maze, the algorithm can “know” which choice for its next step takes it closer to the goal (the center of the maze). I don’t consider this lesson very helpful, but that’s because I saw a much better explanation of maze-solving algorithms here:

Start video at 54:35 for demo of the greedy best-first search algorithm

I am continually amazed and humbled by the variety of ways in which people teach these concepts. More important, I realize how some ways of explaining a concept are not at all effective — for me, at least — and another way of explaining makes it clear as crystal.

So, how much should students know about algorithms, if they are to have a general understanding of AI? I think a good start would be to watch and discuss the introductory Khan Academy video, and also to see a further visual (probably animated) representation of another kind of algorithm at work.

What do we talk about when we talk about algorithms?

September 21, 2020 Mindy McAdams

Mashable recently published a series about algorithms.

The first post, “What is an algorithm, anyway?”, addresses the fact that the word algorithm is often bandied about as if it means a mysterious, possibly evil, machine-embedded power.

But an algorithm doesn’t need to have anything to do with computers. An algorithm is a set of instructions for how to solve a problem. A recipe for a cake is an algorithm.

And yes, of course, computer software is full of algorithms. The programs that make machine learning and artificial intelligence work are full of algorithms. So algorithms are not magical, and they are not good or bad by nature. Also, they are not perfect.

We went through a period — maybe five years, maybe more — when there were a ton of articles about algorithms, and the word became almost common in nonfiction book titles. Now I see a shift toward the term AI — or artificial intelligence, or machine learning — substituting for algorithms in provocative headlines.

Too many articles, though, don’t make much of an effort to differentiate, to explain what they’re really talking about. They may as well just say computers, or software.

An algorithm is real. It is constructed by a person, or people, to do a certain task. Algorithms are often combined, so that inside one algorithm, another algorithm is followed. Thus algorithms can be components of other algorithms.

I’m often reminded of a book I read three years ago, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. It was fun to read, but it was hardly the breezy self-help type of thing the cover blurbs might lead one to believe. The authors describe and explain a number of established algorithms used widely in various fields and applications — and they apply each one to everyday life.

Stories about the people who discovered (authored) many of the algorithms are woven in. I appreciated seeing how someone working on one problem sometimes ended up solving another. I also saw how an algorithm built for one use gets repurposed for other ends. Best of all, I understood what many of the algorithms are meant to do — as well as how they do it.

What I’d like to see in general articles about algorithms is a little more of what Christian and Griffiths managed to do in their book.

How would you respond to the trolley problem?

September 11, 2020September 18, 2020 Mindy McAdams

MIT has a cool and easy-to-play game (okay, not really a game, but like a game) in which you get to choose what a self-driving car would do when facing an imminent crash situation.

*Above: Results from one round of playing the MoralMachine*

At the end of one round, you get to see how your moral choices measure up to those of other people who have played. Note that all the drawings of people in the game have distinct meanings. People inside the car are also represented. Try it yourself here.

It is often discussed how the split-second decision affecting who lives, who dies is one of the most difficult aspects of training an autonomous vehicle.

Imagine this scenario:

“The car is programmed to sacrifice the driver and the occupants to preserve the lives of bystanders. Would you get into that car with your child?”
—Meredith Broussard, The Atlantic, 2018

In a 2018 article, Self-Driving Cars Still Don’t Know How to See, data journalist and professor Meredith Broussard tackled this question head-on. We find that the way the question is asked elicits different answers. If you say the driver might die, or be injured, if a child in the street is saved, people tend to respond: Save the child! But if someone says, “You are the driver,” the response tends to be: Save me.

You can see the conundrum. When programming the responses into the self-driving car, there’s not a lot of room for fine-grained moral reasoning. The car is going to decide in terms of (a) Is a crash is imminent? (b) What options exist? (c) Does any option endanger the car’s occupants? (d) Does any option endanger other humans?

In previous posts, I’ve written a little about the weights and probability calculations used in AI algorithms. For the machine, this all comes down to math. If (a) is True, then what options are possible? Each option has a weight. The largest weight wins. The prediction of the “best outcome” is based on probabilities.