For the past twenty-five years I’ve tried to avoid saying “no”. Whether in website management, security or law, “have you thought of…?” seems much more fruitful. In the short term it lets us discuss alternatives, in the long term it encourages – or at least doesn’t discourage – the questioner to come back. So it […]
Heard in a recent AI conversation: “I’m worried about black boxes”. But observation suggests that’s not a hard and fast rule: we’re often entirely happy to stake our lives, and those of others, on systems we don’t understand; and we may worry even about those whose workings are fully public. So what’s going on? Outside […]
I’d been musing on a post on how “Artificial Intelligence” can be an unhelpful metaphor. But the European Parliament’s ThinkTank has written a far better one, so read theirs…
“Algorithms” haven’t had the best press recently. So it’s been fascinating to hear from the ReEnTrust project, which actually started back in 2018, on Rebuilding and Enabling Trust in Algorithms. Their recent presentations have looked at explanations, but not (mostly) the mathematical ones that are often the focus. Rather than trying to reverse engineer a […]