I’ve been studying artificial systems
for decades now in production eliza
machine learning techniques and today
i’d like to talk about a really hot
topic and that is artificial
intelligence and its role in the
healthcare system one of the things that
i think has caused a lot of panic as
people fail to take a fully cybernetic
view of the world to take a cybernetic
view means to ask questions like what
are the fitness functions that this
thing has to satisfy how can it
communicate with the rest of the world
what features can it extract from its
reality and what kind of responses can
it provide to the rest of us as it tries
to optimize against its own niche this
is a snakehead look at this ready to go
when when they said the team of today
was movement i desided movement means
invasion an invasive species is a really
good way to do it and this thing looks
brutal right when it got introduced into
the Potomac River basin in 2004 it cost
such a panic that the news reports
started calling it a Frankenfish and if
you’re a biologist a wildlife owl is
just dealing with this kind of a fragile
ecosystem a complex system of in turkey
dinner communicating webs you freak out
on something like this by any fitness
measure that you might have for
traditional species this thing is a
winner right it’s twice as big as
anything that lives there it has no
natural predators it can reproduce twice
a year that’s unusual for fish even
humans can’t reproduce twice a year it
breathes air if you’re fishing you
breathe air you got a leg up
not only that a fin up is that really
should have said oh I need better
writers not only that you it it has the
ability to adapt quickly to its system
and it finds the local varietals
absolutely delicious it eats voraciously
on the local system so it has found a
niche in 2004 it showed up people
panicked everybody expected to take over
they’re probably going to take over the
local buildings and local economy as
well
this is a land-dwelling japanese robot
named ASIMO also named honda man that
was introduced in 2000 by the Honda
Corporation and when it showed up it
gave people a big panic as well
including in the healthcare industry
because one of the things they said is
this thing’s going to be your doctor but
the question remains what is the fitness
function that this robot has to satisfy
or that any artificial intelligence has
to satisfy what makes it succeed if it’s
going to succeed or fail it’s because of
a certain fitness function and the
fitness function for this thing is
economic we hear about all the
artificial intelligence that’s happening
in the universities and it’s very
interesting stuff I keep up with it too
I read the papers but it’s the
commercial artificial intelligence that
we really are interacting with and that
stuff has to serve a purpose and it has
to serve a profit and as a guy who has
retired hundreds of artificial
intelligences in my career especially in
the online advertising world I can tell
you survival is not an easy thing it’s
not a guaranteed thing not even for
something like Asimov that has the the
power of Honda behind it so his future
is uncertain he’s not going to be
walking around a hospital handing out
prescriptions anytime soon because the
intelligences that have been that we
have generated in order to handle
diagnosis and monitoring are being
broken up into a bunch of different
species your own client finally their
own niches and trying to optimize
against their own survival in 1948
Norbert Wiener one of my favorite
authors proved that two systems cannot
communicate with each other if they
don’t coexist in the same dimension of
time now that sounds rather abstract but
it’s very true to communicate means to
exchange information and information is
the resolution of uncertainty that is
its mathematical definition you have an
uncertainty before and you have a
resolution after that’s Claude Shannon’s
definition you cannot have communication
unless you have a dimension of time that
establishes before and after you can
play around with that dimension of time
which you have to have a before in and
after to establish communication between
systems like the systems
azzam I was trying to invade but just as
important there are a lot of potentially
fatal commune
Kayson blockages between us and an
artificial intelligence imagine two
people trying to communicate over a
telephone wire via telephone who don’t
speak the same language the only
features they can exchange our words and
they don’t have words that they have in
common that’s called the feature
extraction of phase of how an AI is
learning from the world so they would
have a very difficult time communicating
AI has a very difficult time sucking
data through this thin slice of the user
experience so that it can create
optimizations some of the things that
will not be able to extract on for a
very long time if ever is the urge to
care for somebody else or the ability to
notice that a woman is struggling to
read a form you just gave her even
though she has glasses on because she
may have ocular tumors your AI is not
going to pick up that part of the
communication system another thing you
cannot comprehend in any way is taste
and in fact it’s humans we can’t even
communicate well about this right now I
can’t talk to you about what is too
spicy for you and then have a way to
monitor that it’s hard to have a
conversation about these sorts of
intangibles in the United States Indian
restaurants have come to moderate how
much curry they will put into their food
into what’s called a normative response
right the average response i’ve had to
go to the same restaurant Indian
restaurant a multiple of times and say I
wanted homestyle before they’ll actually
give it to me homestyle and then the
joke’s on me so what is a normative
response we do this all the time anytime
we’re about to cross cultures or about
to create a new experience or bring new
friends into new things we provide a
normative response and we train our
machines to do this same thing we train
our machines to say if I had the time to
read a billion rows of data and I was I
didn’t have time today because I pick up
the kids I would give this response to
so that’s what a normative responses and
we’re forcing these normative responses
on into our machines to come back with
essentially averages and blasé
predictions
now this is perfectly scientific you
think about what a bunch of the medical
profession is I’ve been everywhere about
this dot a bunch of the medical
profession
is saying this worked for a patient
that’s kind of like you and so I’m going
to give it to you now and I’m hoping
that this will work for you
that’s perfectly scientific but it
limits your ability to deliver something
extraordinary so as the father of a
daughter this was an extraordinary
moment for me and I think it probably
was for a lot of people but the
prediction earring that happened before
this movie came out was pretty pretty
bland it had a lot of positive
indicators going for it it’s big special
effects driven it was branded content
everybody knows who Wonder Woman is it
had a great summer release but it had
some negative indicators coming out as
well it was emotional content it was
directed by a woman and the character
had appeared before in another movie and
that will be tanked
probably you can’t even name what that
movie was anybody so the machines and
the humans came out with the exact same
prediction they said how’s this movie
gonna do and they all went man nobody
really knew of course post facto there’s
a lot of belief that the presidential
election impacted a female empowerment
movement and that drove box office for
Wonder Woman which is not something
that’s going to make it into your neural
net model female empowerment zeitgeist
is not a variable in your logistic
regression to predict box-office success
and it’s unlikely to be in the near
future so speaking of an extraordinary
woman here are two more I am a proud dad
that’s my daughter on the right this is
Sandra Park Sandra Park got 23andme as a
birthday present a couple years ago and
they send her all these follow-up
questions all the time hey you thought
this questionnaire we’re interested in
your health and she got one one day and
she was going through and she’s checking
off like has your handwriting become
small no has your voice become frail no
and she’s going down she’s going down at
the end of this form she realizes her
husband has Parkinson’s disease she
didn’t know that her husband was being
taken care of by a whirl
class medical institution if I said the
name you’d know it and be like hey
world-class medical institution 23andme
tis a massive data mining operation with
thousands of servers ordering great work
every day but the institution of
marriage became the linking
communication subsystem between this
data mining operation with thousands of
servers there and this health care
system with thousands of doctors there
that informational subsystem is an
important part of the entire ecosystem
that the artificial intelligence is
trying to invade at this point I
probably sound like I’m trying to
belittle artificial intelligence we’re
not having a tongue and you suck you
don’t have a tongue which should
causality be the other way around but
I’m not really what these things do is
pretty majestic it’s beautiful
a is going places we’ve never been we
can never go it’s exploring parts of the
world we’ve never seen from a data
perspective and I know I sound like a
proud dad but it is undeniable that when
you have one of these things launched
and they work and things start working
out and I’m working in cancer now so my
stuff sometimes helps people survive
it’s an extremely satisfying feeling but
consider life as an artificial
intelligence you are relying on faint
signals from a distant world you’re
relying on people to remember to tell
you things that are going to be
important to you like female empowerment
zeitgeist you have only very low powered
signals you can send back you could say
things like here’s an average based on
something that I think is kind of like
something else that might be what you’re
looking for and nobody gives you points
for trying if you miss nobody cares
nobody’s going to come by and say oh I’m
sorry and you don’t even have the
satisfaction of drowning your sorrows in
a good curry and writing terrible poetry
of do to your hopelessness because
there’s no profit incentive for you to
have those kind of emotes so you’re
completely at the whim of your makers
and I want to encourage you to think
these things as satellites they’re
living out in a world exploring parts of
the world that we haven’t had access to
yet
but we’re trying to get these signals
back and they’re going to send us back
basically the signals we tell them to
the more inventive we get the better
signals that will come back but
understanding that how much we impact in
our communication subsystems impact how
they respond to our world
is an important part in lowering the
dialogue around artificial intelligence
the snakehead that I brought up in the
first slide that in fact has not taken
over the Potomac River Basin the news
reports are that it got introduced when
a woman did which in Buddhism called an
animal release ceremony so this is a
woman recovers from very terrible
illness and she drew upon the
centuries-old tradition of finding an
animal that was destined for the table
and instead releasing it into the wild
and this is a way to say thank you for
my life back to the universe here’s some
life back to you she and in doing this
she’s performing this incredibly human
thing that is well beyond the experience
of the artificial intelligence and as
well beyond the experience of that
snakehead that got introduced that snake
has no idea what Buddhism is but we all
can respond out everybody in that room
in this room can respond to the beauty
of that gesture but the snakehead was
not as optimized as we saw it to handle
these complex systems that it was
suddenly dumped into for one thing I’m
told that thing tastes delicious thank
[Applause] you