ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE
Artificial Intelligence has seen many winters and it is only over the past five years where it has all changed due to a massive increase in computer power, the rise/growing capabilities of The Cloud and general business acceptance.
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One grey area surrounding A.I. is the philosophical challenge – Can you interact with a machine system in such a way that you could be convinced that you are interacting with a human being?
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According to Rick Turner, the CEO of Ditto AI, learning doesn’t have to be a fundamental or an intrinsic requirement for artificial intelligence. This is because a machine doesn’t have to learn from its past behaviour in order to pass the test and answer that question posed above.
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Rick argues that A.I. is much more than just learning systems and there are issues which A.I. cannot solve. Rick explains: “We have a problem with learning algorithms in that they can’t be relied on in regulated or safety critical environments.
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“If you are leaving it to a machine to provide the end solution for the user and it’s basing that conclusion on its interpretation of a mass of data, it’s a black box system and therefore you can’t quiz it for how it arrived at its decision.
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“You don’t know if the decision you’re getting has been impaired by some prejudice or some flaw in the data set that’s gone into training the system up. Therefore, we do need non-learning systems that can correct that problem.”
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Ditto AI is a company which is based in Manchester, UK. Its focus is on capturing human knowledge to recreate human expertise perfectly. This is so that their customers can be sure that any advice or recommendations they are given are complete, consistent and correct every single time.
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One of the main aims for Rick and the company for the past 20 years has been to address a particular problem with A.I., which is its inability to self-account, i.e. explain its reasoning and how it arrived at its decision.
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The company currently has 12 employees and is now at a point where they are raising venture capital to create a business and have completed the fundraising, meaning they are now ready to launch.
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Rick and his colleagues at Ditto AI are now using their patented technology to recreate human expertise, reach rational decisions and show the customer how they reached that conclusion, starting with finance, law and medicine. They will continue to do this as the business grows in 2018 and in the years to come.
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CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO AUDIO CLIPS FROM THE INTERVIEW WITH RICK TURNER
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