Don't Worry About the Computers Taking Over . . . Until They Ask 'Why'
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The Times, London May 29, 2018 Don’t worry about the computers taking over . until they ask ‘why’ Tom Whipple Science Editor It’s not when computers are able to tions. So it would be no challenge for defeat us at board games that we need Alphago to collect enough data to show, to worry about the robot revolution. say, that cocks crow at sunrise. Profes- No, the crucial point will come when sor Pearl said: “I would not trust it to tell the computers have the slightest clue me if it was the rooster crow that caused why they are beating us at all. the sun to rise.” A growing cohort of artificial intel- He said that the AI community was ligence pioneers is arguing that, for all split into two groups: those who the hype about robots supplanting thought this did not matter and those humans, there is a significant flaw in all who thought it was fundamental. “The modern computer programs: they have first group is intoxicated by the success no understanding of cause and effect. of deep-learning and do not under- Until they do, however clever they stand what the fuss is all about. The seem they will never have human-level second, and definitely growing, group intelligence and will not be able to asks: is this human or animal-level in- interact with people in a natural way. telligence?” Theresa May has promised that He believes that there is an insur- machine learning will revolutionise mountable chasm between the two. cancer diagnosis. If it does it will be Geoffrey Hinton, a Google research- partly down to mathematics developed by Judea Pearl in the 1980s. In 2011 he er credited with developing back-propa- won the Turing Award for his work that gation, which underlies much modern AI, said recently of his own work, which enabled artificial intelligence to think is described as helping computers to probabilistically. mimic a human brain: “My view is Professor Pearl said, however, that throw it all away and start again.” what was often missed in the debate If researchers were to start again Pro- about machine intelligence was that fessor Pearl said that they would need maths all but guaranteed that AI would to give computers the same under- never be able to do a far more important standing a human has: a basic know- task: work out how to cure that cancer. ledge of what does and does not make He has written about the problem in sense in the world. “We do not require The Book of Why. He said: “Diagnosis is a detailed model of the world but only a fine. Diagnosis is within the realm of scruffy, conceptual blueprint of some the functions current technology can aspects of the world.” do. All it requires is finding associations Even with the potential gains is it bet- in a pattern of data. It can say, ‘This col- ter to maintain a world where humans lection of symptoms is highly suggest- have at least some advantages over ma- ive of a certain disease’. But it cannot chines? “I don’t know how fearful we say, ‘If you do X then you can cure should be of the possibility of machines cancer.’ That is undoable for a machine taking over,” Professor Pearl said. “I be- that does not have the mental appara- lieve strongly [that] machines will tus to deal with a cause-and-effect rela- eventually do everything that men can tionship.” do. How dangerous that is I cannot say.” He thinks it is misplaced to talk about machines out-thinking humans. Alph- ago, which has outclassed humans at the game of go, is intelligent only “in the sense that we call an owl intelligent: it is not a human-level intelligence”. Modern AI programs spot patterns in huge datasets then identify correla- iSildbhll.