Limits of AI today.

Understanding the limitations of AI: when algorithms fail.

Many companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) and
automation to reduce their costs and increase their productivity. For
example, Deutsche Telekom and Royal Bank of Scotland chose to replace some
call center staff with chatbots, a strategy that could save them billions of euros
over the next five years. Similarly, BNP Paribas and Wolters Kluwer seek to
increase their revenues by using machines to analyze financial markets and
customer databases in real time to launch alerts automatically.
Siemens uses AI to manage its gas turbines more efficiently than humans, and in
the logistics sector, Deutsche Post DHL is deploying IBM AI tools to replace
employees with robots in their warehouses, as Amazon already does. There are
even companies that are using AI with a goal of helping people rather than just
making money; Facebook is deploying AI tools to detect patterns of suicidal
thoughts and, when deemed necessary, send mental health resources to the user at
risk or their friends.
Despite all this, AI still has many limitations that need to be taken into
consideration. In this article, we describe the major limitations of today’s state-of-
the-art AI technology.
AI can fail too:
Machines can fail. For example, Microsoft was forced to disable its Tay chatbot,
which was able to learn through its conversations with users, after Internet users
managed to make it racist and sexist in less than one day. Similarly, Facebook was
forced to admit failure when its bots reached a failure rate of 70% and started
talking to each other in a strange language only they understood. Errors are
acceptable, but the acceptable error rate for critical applications like autonomous
vehicles or a computer-controlled turbines must be minimal because when things
go wrong, it involves human lives. The recent Tesla, Waymo, and Uber car
accidents under autopilot confirm why AI remains a mostly hypothetical
technology to many.
AI needs big data:
Machines are not suitable for all tasks. AI is very effective in rules-based
environments with lots of data to analyze. Its use is therefore relevant for things
such as autonomous cars, which drive in dense traffic governed by specific laws, or
finding the best price at which to resell a batch of shares.
On the other hand, to choose what to invest in, or to recommend products to new
customers without data to exploit, AI is less effective than humans. Lack of rules
or data prevents AI from performing well. The existing AI models require large
amounts of task-specific training data such as ImageNet and CIFAR-10 image
databases, composed of 1.2 million and 60 thousand data points (labeled images),
respectively. Labeling these data is often tedious, slow, and expensive,
undermining the central purpose of AI.
AI needs a dedicated computational infrastructure:
All AI systems’ successes use a specific hardware infrastructure dedicated to the
AI task to be solved. For instance, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero system,
which crushed 18-time world champion Lee Sedol and the reigning world number
one player of Go, Ke Jie,  was trained using 64 GPUs (graphics processing units)
and 19 CPUs (central processing units).
The OpenAI Five system, which defeated amateur human teams at DotA 2, was
trained on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores. In June 2017, Facebook Research
published a paper showing how they succeeded in training an AI model on 1.3
million images in under an hour. However, to achieve this impressive result, which
would have previously taken days on a single system, they used 256 Tesla P100
GPUs.
While the human brain, the smartest system we know in the universe, is
remarkably low in power consumption, computers are still far from matching the
energy efficiency of the brain. A typical adult human brain only consumes around
the equivalent of 12 watts per day, which is a mere fifth of the power required by a
standard 60 watt light bulb in the same time period.
AI does not understand causal reasoning:
AI algorithms, as currently designed, do not take into account the relationship
between cause and effect. They replace causal reasoning with reasoning by
association. For instance, instead of reasoning that dry and cracked skin is caused
by psoriasis, AI only has the capacity to reason that psoriasis correlates with dry
and cracked skin.
During his interview at Quanta Magazine about his new book, The Book of
Why, published on May 15th, 2018, Judea Pearl, the 2011 winner of the Turing
Award and the AI godfather who introduced the probabilistic approach to AI,
mentioned that
“All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting”.
He emphasized that the future of AI should introduce a causal framework in the
design of the next generation of algorithms.
AI is vulnerable to adversarial attacks:
Adversarial attacks are like optical illusions for machines. They are intentionally
designed to cause the model to make a mistake. These attacks add noise of small
amplitude in the data submitted as input to the AI algorithm in order to mislead
these algorithms, forcing them to predict a wrong answer.
The Wall Street Journal successfully applied adversarial attacks to dupe the face
recognition feature of the iPhone X, as shown in their demo, after creating fake
masks to unlock the phone. These results of adversarial attacks are disturbing.
Google researchers have shown that changes almost invisible to the naked eye on
something as innocent-seeming as the image of a panda could disrupt an AI to the
point that it starts to identify a monkey instead.
In another example, researchers at UC Berkeley targeted AIs specifically for voice
transcription. They succeeded in generating and adding an indistinguishable
background noise to a recording, which, though undetectable to the human ear, was
transcribed by AI systems to generate other commands and access the user’s
system for potentially nefarious purposes.
Adversarial attacks are not limited to actions on digital data; it is possible to carry
out such attacks in the real world. A research team comprised of members from
Samsung Research, University of Michigan, University of Washington, and the
University of California, have placed simple white stickers, specifically built, on
road signs and managed to have an AI identify a stop sign as a speed limit sign.
We can immediately see the unfortunate consequences that such malfunctions
could have on an autonomous car.
Conclusion:
Though AI is seen by many as the next big thing, it still has severe limitations that
may have unforeseen and potentially disastrous consequences if it is not
implemented in the correct fashion. With the intensity of research and development
currently being undertaken in this sector, we will likely see advancements to
counteract many of these factors, expanding the potential applications of AI
significantly.