China's AI Strategy and its Security Implications
Gregory C. Allen at the Center for a New American Security has a new report with some interesting analysis and insights into China’s AI strategy, commercial, government, and military. There are numerous security—and national security—implications.
Denton Scratchin Artificial • February 7, 2019 10:51 AM
Oh dear – I have whinged here before about AI hype.
It seems that the article is mainly about the views of senior party officials and military officers about how important it is to have a leading role in something they almost certainly have scant understanding of. And such articles rarely explain what is this ‘AI’ they are referring to.
As far as I’m aware, the only advances that have been made in Artificial Intelligence in the last 40-odd years has been the application of neural nets and machine learning to transform very large datasets into decision graphs.
Sure, the consequences are dramatic: self-driving cars, semi-autonomous killing machines, etc.; but neural nets and machine learning are discussed in a textbook on my bookshelf by Russel and Norvig from 1995 (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach). It’s a college textbook – everything in it was already old-hat when it was published. And even so, it skims over these subjects.
It’s notable that the kinds of programs that emerge from this approach are completely unable to explain their reasoning, even in principle. In fact since they consist of little more than weighted decision graphs, nobody else can explain their reasoning either.
Back in the 80s I did some work with expert systems. These systems were based on logical reasoning, and the principles from which expert systems reasoned were provided by honest-to-goodness domain experts. Consequently these same experts could provide information that could be used to backtrack through the reasoning on request. They were expensive to construct: you needed a domain expert, for starters, and you also needed an expert on expert systems, to guide the domain expert on how to express her expertise. There was a lot of trial and error. And computers were much slower then. It took a long time.
I realize that this supposedly-modern ML-based AI (when combined with big data) can extend beyond the reach of any human domain expert; but I envisage new developments in AI that will do that, AND be able to explain themselves.
I have no idea if anyone is working in that field.