AI Algorithms and the Black Box (Video)
Learn more at KMWorld 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.
Watch the complete video of this presentation in the KMWorld Conference 2018 Video Portal.
In his session at KMWorld 2018, titled “Rethinking KM for an Age of AI & IoT,” Serious Insights founder and principal analyst Daniel W. Rasmus explored the impact of AI and IoT on KM as machines get better and better at sensing the environment, comprehending content, interpreting signals, and anticipating needs.
With newer AI systems that can deal with insights that change based on conditions that may occur in microseconds, it can be difficult for people to be comfortable with decision-making processes that they don’t understand and the choices those automated processes result in.
“And for knowledge management people that should make you very uncomfortable,” said Rasmus. “And it also makes you very uncomfortable if you look at what has happened recently with Twitter and Facebook, etc., in the context of our elections. They have had to bring in people to start looking at what their algorithms are doing, and saying: Are they catching everybody that's doing things that are anti-election-oriented?”
Companies want programmers to use the most efficient method to get to decisions, he observed. Adding requirements for understanding the context and processes of decision making in order to understand it actually makes the systems inefficient.
“Those are all things that put noise into the system, and kind of try to track stuff about what's happening inside the algorithm, but you have to build these big things on top of the supposedly efficient, because when you hire a programmer you're hiring them to be efficient: ‘What's the most efficient way to get to this decision so that we use the least CPU?’ that's their thinking, and now you're saying, ‘I want you to insert all this stuff that tracks all of the things,’ and makes it inefficient.
And so, this is emergent technology that we're just starting to see, and there's probably going to be more of those things. I'll leave that to you to go study what those keys that unlock the AI are.”
Many speakers have made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2018/Presentations.aspx.