Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
Despite the general positive spin around it (&quot;we did it as a learning project&quot;), most people would agree that Tay was both a technical and a PR failure.<p>But the pattern does repeat: Microsoft releases an AI which fails. Tesla&#x27;s autopilot cannot &quot;see&quot; white object on white background. Apparently, Google also had a crash which is recently being claimed as human error. My guess is that this list is not going to stop here.<p>Suppose I ask you to build me a teleporting machine. You try, and like the movie Spaceballs, my torso and up comes out aligned wrong. This is now declared part of the iterative learning process, except that the cost borne by the corporations for the failure is quite minuscule compared to the cost borne by the affected party (risk asymmetry).<p>So while people talk about the huge advancements in AI, shouldn&#x27;t we be quite skeptical especially at this point? Since none of us have seen the alternate parallel universes, and considering<p>a) the resources being thrown at the problem<p>b) the risk asymmetry involved<p>c) the privacy intrusion involved in the data collection (you knew I would bring it up, didn&#x27;t you?) and not to mention<p>d) the inability of anyone to demand any kind of transparency from these AI pioneers<p>I can as well ask, are we as a society paying too high a cost for this progress? Could we really not do any better than this?