Part 2: Professor Melanie Mitchell. What’s Intelligence?

We continue unpacking with Dr. Mitchell the concept of intelligence and the importance of justice and ethics, including when it comes to computers.  In working on her book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Professor Mitchell had a few surprises about both the successes and limits of AI, and offers some cautionary notes as we increasingly look to machines for answers and to do things for us.  Computers do things by brute force computation whereas humans use analogies, that is, drawing from prior experience to inform other judgments in different contexts.  One way to think about this is that hard computations are easy for computers; but easy things for a person, like describing what’s going on outside your window, is very difficult for a computer.  Plus, just because a computer does one thing exceptionally well, it may do other things poorly.  Troy and Lee share some of their own thoughts at the end.  AfD Conference!  Troy and Lee are going to host a conference in late April or early May!  Details to come, so please check afdfintech.com regularly.  You can also follow us on Twitter at @AfDfintech.