What machine learning can and cannot do ?

One of the most common questions I hear when I'm speaking to executives about AI is: "Are you sure it's safe?"

The answer is yes. But it's not easy.

I'll show you why.

AI is a powerful tool that can be used for good or for bad. In this video and the next, I hope to help you develop intuition about what AI can and cannot do in practice. In practice, before I commit to a specific AI project, I'll usually have either myself or engineers do technical diligence on the project to make sure that it is feasible. This means looking at the data, looking at the input, and output A and B; thinking through if this is something AI can really do; and just thinking through if this is something AI can really do. What I've seen unfortunately is that some CEOs can have an inflated expectation of AI and can ask engineers to do things that today's AI just cannot do. One of the challenges is that media tends to only report on positive results or success stories using AI, while we see a string of success stories and no failure stories—people sometimes think AI can do everything. Unfortunately, that's just not true. 

When you’re looking for an AI system to do a task, you may use the rule of thumb that anything you could do with a second of thought can probably be done by an AI system. On the other hand, if there is something that you can’t think of in less than a second, then it might not be possible to build an AI system for that task. One imperfect rule of thumb you can use to decide what supervised learning may or may not be able to do is that, pretty much anything you could do with a second of thought, we can probably now or soon using this input-output mapping. So for example, in order to determine the position of other cars, that’s something that you can do with less than a second. In order to tell if a phone is scratched, you can tell in less than a second. It maybe gives you a way to quickly think of some examples of tasks that AI systems can do. Whereas in contrast, something that AI today cannot do would be: The writing you once did by hand is now done automatically by machines.