If We Want Robots to Be Good, We May Need to Destroy Their Self Confidence. Weve all worried about artificial intelligence reaching a point in which its cognitive ability is so far beyond ours that it turns against us. But what if we just turned the AI into a spineless weenie that longs for our approvalPreface By Colonel P J Tabor MVO, The Blues and Royals Commander Household Cavalry he past year has been another extraordinary one for the Household Cavalry which. Some songs stick to your soul like ectoplasm. Whether youre at the club or Chuck E. Cheese, sometimes you hear a certain song that brings you back to a moment in. QuAX3aY/TJEJ6dHdOPI/AAAAAAAABho/uamlwf50iSc/s1600/Untitled.png' alt='Devil May Cry 5 Highly Compressed Kgb' title='Devil May Cry 5 Highly Compressed Kgb' />Researchers are suggesting that could be a great step towards improving the algorithms, even if they arent out to murder us. Films and TV shows like Blade Runner, Humans, and Westworld, where highly advanced robots have noRead more Read. In a new paper, a team of scientists has begun to explore the practical and philosophical question of how much self confidence AI should have. Dylan Hadfield Menell, a researcher at the University of California and one of the authors of the paper, tells New Scientist that Facebooks newsfeed algorithm is a perfect example of machine confidence gone awry. The algorithm is good at serving up what it believes youll click on, but its so busy deciding if it can get your engagement, it doesnt ask whether or not it should. Hadfield Menell feels that the AI would be better at making choices and identifying fake news if it was programmed to seek out human oversight. In order to put some data behind this idea, Hadfield Menells team created a mathematical model they call the off switch game. The premise is simple a robot has an off switch and a task a human can turn off the robot whenever they want, but the robot can override the human only if it believes it should. Confidence could mean a lot of things in AI. It could mean that the AI has been trained to assume its sensors are more reliable than a humans perception, and if a situation is unsafe, the human should not be allowed to switch it off. It could mean, that the AI knows more about productivity goals and the human will be fired if this process isnt completeddepending on the task, it will probably mean a ton of factors are being considered. The study doesnt come to any conclusions about how much confidence is too muchthats really a case by case scenario. It does lay out some theoretical models in which the AIs confidence is based on its perception of its own utility and its lack of confidence in human decision making. The model allows us to see some hypothetical outcomes of what happens when an AI has too much or too little confidence. But more importantly, its putting a spotlight on this issue. Especially in these nascent days of artificial intelligence, our algorithms need all the human guidance they can get. A lot of that is being accomplished through machine learning and all of us acting as guinea pigs while we use our devices. But machine learning isnt great for everything. For quite a while, the top search result on Google for the question, Did the Holocaust happen was a link to the white supremacist website Stormfront. Google eventually conceded that its algorithm wasnt showing the best judgment and fixed the problem. Hadfield Menell and his colleagues maintain that AI will need to be able to override humans in many situations. A child shouldnt be allowed to override a self driving cars navigation systems. Fix Cracks In Driveway Concrete. A future breathalyzer app should be able to stop you from sending that 3 AM tweet. There are no answers here, just more questions. The team plans to continue working on the problem of AI confidence with larger datasets for the machine to make judgments about its own utility. For now, its a problem that we can still control. Unfortunately, the self confidence of human innovators is untameable. Cornell University via New Scientist.