Etiquette Lessons for AI
When B.J. May stepped out of his Georgia home on a sunny day, he experienced one of my favorite AI whoopsies. The “smart” facial recognition-based lock on his front door wouldn’t let him back in because it was protecting the residents from… The image above is a slide from one of my talks. When I ask reliability engineers what the mistake is on this slide, I’m amazed how often they ignore the directionally challenged road markings because they’re too busy hollering “when, not if!” Good. I’m with them: the if is the bigger issue. Mistakes will happen.
A good reminder for all spheres in life is to expect mistakes whenever a task is difficult, complicated, or taking place at scale. Humans make mistakes and so do machines; mathematics doesn’t trump the rules of common sense. The most dangerous mistake you can make is forgetting that mistakes will happen with AI. When we attempt to automate complex tasks and build complex systems, we should expect imperfect performance. This is true for traditional complex systems and it’s even more painfully true for AI systems.
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