AGENDA

What if AI succeed ?
 What if AI succeed ?
• Companies across industries are adopting Artificial Intelligence to scale up and improve their business
operations. Advances in Deep Learning are helping drive the business success from e-commerce to
national security. Data is the most important ingredient to a successful recipe of an AI model. Unlike
traditional coding models, the outcome of an AI algorithm is very dependent on the data used to train it
as it infers results based on what it has been trained on.
 What if AI succeed ?
• It's quite similar to teaching a young child. When a toddler sees an Alaskan husky, its parents help to
identify it as a “dog”. Now the toddler has a word for the four-legged furry thing, which she can use to
identify its movement and its behaviour. But what happens when the toddler comes across a cat? She
may very well assume it to be a dog too. Here, the parents will help her to understand that a cat, while
four-legged and furry, behaves quite differently from the concept of “dog”. The feedback mechanism
helps the toddler build up a recognition framework. There may still be edge cases, for example where a
very furry small dog can be mistaken for a cat - until it makes a sound. This is an additional feature
extracted from the data to increase the differentiation.
 What if AI succeed ?
Computer Vision

• In supervised learning, machines learn from labelled examples. In Computer Vision, the machine is
taught to identify everyday objects like chairs, table, and pillars in a room, or cars, pedestrians, and
pavement on the road. The training data set needs the “ideal answer”, also known as “ground truth”,
to be associated with each training sample, for the machine to build a feedback loop and improve its
answers. Associating the ground truth with the data is called labelling, and relies on human specialists.
• This is called human judgement. This concept also applies to other types of data. For Natural
Language Processing, machines need to be taught the difference between “That chicken burger was so
bad” and “I want a chicken burger so bad”. Though both sentences share several words, they mean
totally different things. Hence machines need to be trained on a large volume of meticulously labelled
data. This is where humans step in to parent the machine-learning model.
 What if AI succeed ?
Functioning

• To a machine, an image is simply a series of pixels. But labelled images show machines that certain
collection of pixels are certain semantic objects (like a lamppost or a truck). The images are labelled by
data experts or “Humans in the Loop”. Labelling experts perform semantic segmentation on hundreds
of street images every day. They label the elements in the images into predetermined classes of
objects, ultimately dividing the image into semantically meaningful parts. Similarly, in NLP, humans in
the loop perform named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, speech to text validation to help
bolster the machine learning.

• Without human judgment, such data is opaque and cannot be used to train machine-learning
algorithms. Likewise, humans also audit the results of an algorithm, to ensure it isn’t going off-track.
Human nuance combines with machine scale to create a machine learning solution. The reliance on
humans is a lesser-known aspect of machine learning and can come as a surprise to new practitioners.
 What if AI succeed ?
Functioning

• To a machine, an image is simply a series of pixels. But labelled images show machines that certain
collection of pixels are certain semantic objects (like a lamppost or a truck). The images are labelled by
data experts or “Humans in the Loop”. Labelling experts perform semantic segmentation on hundreds
of street images every day. They label the elements in the images into predetermined classes of
objects, ultimately dividing the image into semantically meaningful parts. Similarly, in NLP, humans in
the loop perform named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, speech to text validation to help
bolster the machine learning.

• Without human judgment, such data is opaque and cannot be used to train machine-learning
algorithms. Likewise, humans also audit the results of an algorithm, to ensure it isn’t going off-track.
Human nuance combines with machine scale to create a machine learning solution. The reliance on
humans is a lesser-known aspect of machine learning and can come as a surprise to new practitioners.
 What if AI succeed ?
• Data labelling is an increasingly specialised service. In the past, machine learning efforts relied on the
data scientists or some interns, to perform the labelling. Today, companies must plan for scalable and
secure data pipelines where they can ensure consistent and high-quality labels for millions of data
points. Scientists must be able to iterate rapidly on training experiments and add or remove features
which help them get better results. More and more nuanced categories of data need to be labelled.
Diversity in the labelling workforce can also help create a more rounded input data set in very
subjective scenarios.

• To successfully choose, pilot and implement machine learning within your company, you have to ask
some key questions before you deploy a highly paid Machine Learning team. First, where is the data?
Do you have proprietary data or are you going to use public datasets? Will your choice create enough
accuracy and differentiation in the problem you set out to solve? Next, how will you pilot and scale
your data labelling and auditing efforts? Do you have a reliable vendor who can grow with your needs?
Today’s algorithms can deliver increasingly higher accuracy if trained on larger and larger data sets
 What if AI succeed ?
• Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline: “Stephen Hawking warns that rise of
robots may be disastrous for mankind.” And as many have lost count of how many similar articles
they’ve seen. Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and
they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because they’ve become conscious
and/or evil. On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly
summarize the scenario that AI researchers don’t worry about. That scenario combines as many as
three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, and robots.

• If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-
driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving
car? Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, it’s irrelevant to AI risk. If
you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious.
In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it
subjectively feels.
 What if AI succeed ?
• The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isn’t malevolence, but
competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may
be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans don’t generally hate ants, but
we’re more intelligent than they are – so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and there’s an anthill
there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the
position of those ants.

• The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t have goals. Machines can
obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-
seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target. If you feel threatened by a
machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that
troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose. If that heat-
seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldn’t exclaim: “I’m not worried, because machines
can’t have goals!”