Why are we using black box models in AI when we don’t need to? (2019)
&gt; [...] these black box models are created directly from data by an algorithm, meaning that humans, even those who design them, cannot understand how variables are being combined to make predictions.<p>So uhhh, isn&#x27;t this like not science? Like my biggest problem with &quot;machine learning&quot; is people assume the data they have can correctly answer the question they want to answer.<p>If your data is off, your model might be incredibly close for a huge portion of the population (or for the biased sample you unknowingly have), but then wildly off somewhere else and you won&#x27;t know until it&#x27;s too late because it&#x27;s not science (e.g. racist AI making racist predictions).<p>A model cannot be accurate if it doesn&#x27;t have enough information (like predicting crime, or the stock market). There are an insane amount of statistical tests to detect bullshit, and yet we&#x27;re pushing those and hypothesis testing right out the window when we create models we don&#x27;t understand.<p>Like I just don&#x27;t get how some folks say &quot;look what my AI knows&quot; and assume it&#x27;s even remotely right without understanding the underlying system of equations and dataset. You honestly don&#x27;t even know if the answer you&#x27;re receiving back is to the question you&#x27;re asking, it might just be strongly correlated bullshit that&#x27;s undetectable to you the ignorant wizard.<p>I find it pretty hard to believe we can model the physical forces inside a fucking neutron star (holla at strange matter) but literally no one in the world could pen an equation (model) on how to spot a fucking cat or a hotdog without AI? Of course someone could, it would just feel unrewarding to invest that much time into doing it correctly.<p>I guess I can sum this up with, I wish people looked at AI more as a tool to help guide our intuition helping us solve problems we already have well defined knowledge (and data) of, and not as an means to an end itself.