Why is AI harder than we think?

“Why AI is harder than we think” – that’s the title of a recent paper by Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute. 

The paper is in two parts. The first explores the history of AI, beginning with McCarthy in 1957 to the present. She explains that the AI process has been instead punctuated, and she explains in a way that seems plausible. AI always seems to burst out with dramatic advances, then doesn’t live up to the hype, and hibernates for a few years, the so-called AI Winter.

Mitchell predicts that we’re heading into another AI Winter because the hype over AI is beyond its capabilities. She goes into detail about problems with “Shortcut Learning,” which I’ll address below after describing the second half of the paper, which covers what she calls the four fallacies of AI:

There are insidious problems with AI beyond the issues of bias and bad data. It starts with a lack of understanding of how AI works. For example, have you ever heard of a digital technology that didn’t have “bugs”? AI does, but they tend to be sort of inscrutable. How do you find them? If you’re lucky, you will notice errant predictions or classifications that are conflicting or irrational. Other times you won’t notice them at all. One approach that you should not take is trial-and-error. It’s better to understand what is happening in your models.

Here is an example of wasting time and money instead of using the proper diagnostic equipment to draw an analogy. Suddenly the dashboard lit up in my car, and it went into limp mode, meaning something was wrong with the engine, and it would not go faster than 600RPM. I tried an old trick with these hyper-computerized cars of disconnecting the negative terminal and letting it sit for ten minutes, hoping that it would reset whatever code was causing it to limp when I reconnected. I didn’t work. I limped home and put it in the garage. The first thing I noticed was that the bank of six cylinders on the right side was not functioning, and the bank on the left side was operating at a normal range. My first thought was to swap the “brains,” the two twin engine management computers, to see if I could reproduce the problem on the other side. It did. Problem solved. One of the computers was faulty. I ordered a new one, about $700. When it came, I installed it and, nothing changed. It must be the spark plug wires. A new set for this engine was over $800. Nothing changed.

 It had been almost a month of frustration, so I decided just to take a look at everything. I started by looking closely at the right side turbocharger, and I noticed a small crack in the plastic charge pipe that takes the boosted air from the turbocharger and the intercooler into the throttle assembly. My OBDII Scanner did not have current codes for this model. I ordered one from the dealer. ($1200). I plugged it in and, voila, the reduced boost pressure through a code that I didn’t see.