Artificial Intelligence, Autonomy, and Human-Machine Teams: Interdependence, Context, and Explainable AI
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Context Editorial Editorial Introduction to the Special Articles on Context Artificial Intelligence, Autonomy, and Human-Machine Teams: Interdependence, Context, and Explainable AI W. F. Lawless, Ranjeev Mittu, Donald Sofge, Laura Hiatt Because in military situations, as ontext supposedly explains everything in the envi- well as for self-driving cars, information ronment that influences our perceptions, cognitions, must be processed faster than humans actions (Sober 2009), and awareness, the latter set- can achieve, determination of context C ting the stage for deception (Lawless 2017a.) For example, computationally, also known as sit- Wells Fargo, the largest US mortgage lender and the third uational assessment, is increasingly largest US bank, “admitted to deceiving the US government important. In this article, we introduce the topic of context, and we discuss into insuring thousands of risky mortgages” (Stempel 2016). what is known about the heretofore Context is the word sequence in a sentence that allows the intractable research problem on the brain to discover a missing word, unravel the meaning of effects of interdependence, present in handwriting, or repair faulty grammar (McClelland and the best of human teams; we close by Rumelhart 1988). With Bayesian inference, Marwah and proposing that interdependence must colleagues (2012) applied context-specific ontologies in be mastered mathematically to oper- cancer research. An organization’s context is its manage- ate human-machine teams efficiently, ment, culture, and systems (Doolen et al. 2003). to advance theory, and to make the machine actions directed by AI explain- able to team members and society. The special topic articles in this issue and a subsequent issue of AI Magazine review ongoing mature research and operational programs that address context for human-machine teams. Copyright © 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602 FALL 2019 5 Context Editorial The Definition of Context clouds, but he phoned his duty officer and informed him of a false alarm. The duty officer passed the false- Merriam-Webster1 offers two definitions of context: alarm message up the chain of command without “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or asking Petrov for an explanation. passage and can throw light on its meaning; or, the Context is determined by an awareness of social interrelated conditions in which something exists or reality (Pfautz et al. 2015, p. 42), interdependently, occurs; for example, setting the historical context of that is, change the situation, players, or social norms, the war.” and context changes (Lawless et al. 2018). For example, In a review of the theories of meaning, Speaks (2017) context changes after a sports team substitutes a nov- states that different meanings arise from different ice for its star player, after a deception is uncovered in situations: “These situations are typically called con- court before a jury, or after a political party changes its texts of utterance, or just contexts, and expressions leadership. The context of war changed early in 2018 whose reference depends on the context are called with news that a swarm of drones attacked a previously indexicals or context-dependent expressions.” impregnable Russian base in Syria, reportedly killing The Oxford English Dictionary2 locates the origin Russian soldiers (Grove 2018).3 of context in Late Middle English, from Latin weave Already, the disruptive economic impact of ma- and text, meaning, “The circumstances that form the chine learning (ML), a subset of artificial intelli- setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms gence, has been estimated in the trillions of dollars of which it can be fully understood.” (Brynjolfsson and Mitchell 2017). Applications of In AI Magazine, it has been common to define ML and other AI algorithms are having an unprec- context as situational awareness (as, for example, by edented impact across industry, the military, medi- Pfautz et al. [2015, p. 42]). Authors in AI Magazine cine, finance, and society generally. But as autonomous have also sometimes used the term context for internal machines become important to society, so does processing, as occurs in natural language understand- context. Judea Pearl (2002) warned AI scientists that ing; for example, “translating text from one natural they must “build machines that make sense of what language to another ... [based on a constructed] inter- goes on in their environment,” a warning that un- nal representation” (Brill and Mooney 1997, p. 21). heeded could impede further development (Pearl What we like about the definition used inAI Maga- and Mackenzie 2018). zine is that the awareness of a context or situation For example, self-driving cars have been involved may be nonverbal and not lend itself exclusively to a in at least three fatalities, including that of a pedes- “mental object with semantic properties … [to make] trian, yet humans, not ML, had to unravel the pedes- sense of each other’s behavior” (Pitt 2018). After all, trian’s context. After the pedestrian’s death in March for quantum mechanics, no consensus exists on its 2018, an article in Commentary (Rothman 2018) meaning even after nearly a century of debate, yet it blamed the pedestrian, an article in the New York is the most predictive of sciences (see, for example, Times (Wakabayashi 2018) blamed Uber’s self-driving the work of Weinberg [2017]). autonomy software, and the preliminary decision When is context clear? Clear context might be a by the National Transportation Safety Board (2018) chaplain giving last rites, a prearranged visit with a blamed Uber, because the car saw the pedestrian doctor, or an official letter from the IRS demanding 6 seconds ahead and selected emergency braking back taxes. 1.3 seconds ahead, but the emergency brakes were When is context unclear? An uncertain context not operational and could not improve the car’s per- might be the fog of war, a shout from an airline steward formance. The vehicle operator engaged the steering to brace for impact, or the legal rules of discovery wheel less than a second before impact and began preventing objective reconstruction for the context braking 1 second after impact. For our purposes, the of a crime (Felson and Eckert 2015). car performed appropriately, and it performed faster When is context an illusion? In 1944, based on than the human operator, but it was not programmed an expedition that found evidence for Einstein’s the- to share what it knew, although it could have almost ory of relativity, an editorial in the New York Times 5 seconds before the human became aware of the declared that the world was illusory. The physicist situation. Carlo Rovelli (Garner 2016) wrote that “reality is not These seemingly unrelated problems regarding con- as it appears.” Humans are prey to Adelson’s (2000) text require an interdisciplinary approach to solve, checkerboard illusion, whereas photometers are not. but, until now, social science has been slow to con- Cybercriminals and spies rely on illusion. tribute to a theory of interdependence for human- A 1983 example of computers and context comes machine teams (Lawless 2017a; Lawless 2017b). from the RAND Corporation. Irving (2018) writes Although social science has contributed to the devel- that on September 26, 1983, in a bunker near Moscow, opment of statistical analysis, it has struggled with Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was monitoring Russian sat- the replication of experiments (Open Science Col- ellite data for signs of missile launches by the United laboration 2015). Relatedly, interdependence theory States when a siren sounded. Petrov’s screen flashed indicates that the information from behavior and “Missile launch” five times. Petrov didn’t know that mental concepts of behavior are orthogonal, produc- a satellite had misinterpreted sunlight reflected on ing poor correlations (for example, see the work of 6 AI MAGAZINE Context Editorial Zell and Krizan [2014]). Putting aside that psycho- explanations (Kambhampati 2018). And for mutual logic tests can be financially lucrative, personality context, can AI machines interdependently affect and other tests have been discredited as invalid, but human awareness, teams, and society, and how they have not been discontinued — for example, might these machines be affected in turn? In short, the Myers–Briggs personality test, the most lucrative in real time, can situational awareness of context be test in psychology (Emre 2018); the implicit associa- mutually constructed, mutually shared, and mutu- tion test, used to determine implicit racism (Blanton ally trusted among machines and humans and thus 2009), although racism is resistant to treatment be productive, safe, efficient, and a benefit to society? (Jussim 2017); and self-esteem tests, used in schools To address these questions, we need to know more for decades (Baumeister et al. 2005). about the effects of interdependence, which Jones (1998, p. 33) said characterized social interaction but was bewildering theoretically. Nonetheless, our knowl- The Future Determination edge about interdependence is growing (Lawless of Shared Context in Real Time 2017a; Lawless 2017b). It not only determines con- with Human-Machine Teams text (Lawless et al. 2018), but it is a social state very sensitive to changes in context, exemplified by insta- The US Department of Defense is shifting to real- bility when two adversaries angrily express their two- time operations, which