A Glance into the Dull World of ‘Explainable AI’

Well, if you have a burning desire to talk to a machine that pretends to understand why it’s doing something, you’re in for a treat. Silicon Valley oracles are raving about the latest sci-fi wet dream called ‘Explainable AI.’ You know, the thing that’s supposed to make artificially intelligent machines ‘trustworthy’ because they can give sciency-sounding responses about why they decided to turn your thermostat down two degrees. Oh my! The suspense!

Too Slow-witted to Grasp Decrypting ‘Explainable AI’?

Explainable AI or XAI, for the acronym addicted folk out there, aims to build transparent AI systems that can tell you why the heck they did what they did. The idea, in essence, is to bridge the gap between the enigmatic mind of a machine and us ordinary beings. When your dinky little Roomba decides not to vacuum the living room for the third day in a row, it should be able to give you a viable reason.

The ‘Possible’ Reverberations of this Mediocre Breakthrough

In theory, this giant leap in nerd culture could have untold implications across tech and beyond. From the healthcare sector to defense mechanisms, this piece of science fiction could allow for levels of trust previously the reserve of humans amongst themselves. We could soon have AI systems explaining why they’ve decided to diagnose that you’re obviously physically and mentally unfit to run five miles, or why your self-driving car has decided to take a detour to avoid the traffic that you, with your puny human brain, couldn’t foresee.

The ‘Hot Take’ on This Development

Most of you would be head over heels for this latest nugget of wisdom from our geeky counterparts. What could be better than villainous, opaque bots suddenly turning all buddy-buddy, right? But make no mistake, folks. Just because your AI toaster can explain why it’s burnt your toast to a crisp, doesn’t mean it actually cared about your breakfast. It’s still a big chunk of circuits and binary code, no matter how charming its explanations may be. Just remember, the word ‘artificial’ in AI wasn’t just thrown in there because it sounded fancy. So instead of putting faith in some psycho-babble spitting machines, wake up to the reality and embrace the fact that a machine will always be a heartless machine.

Original article:https://venturebeat.com/ai/why-the-latest-1-billion-ai-startup-doesnt-want-to-beat-openai/