DARPA director clear-eyed and cautious on AI -- GCN

Artificial intelligence has gained serious attention as a solution for complex problems, but the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency cautions against viewing it as a panacea. "When we look at what's happening with artificial intelligence, we see something that is very, very powerful, very valuable for military applications, but we also see a technology that is still quite fundamentally limited," DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said at the Atlantic Council on May 2. Image analysis, Prabhakar said, reveals some of the technology's limitations. While AI and machine learning systems are statistically better than humans at identifying images because they can sift through thousands of images in seconds, "the problem is that when they're wrong, they are wrong in ways that no human would ever be wrong," she said. In one case, a picture of a baby holding a toothbrush was identified by a machine as a baby with a baseball bat. "I think this is a critically important caution about where and how we would use this generation of artificial intelligence," she said.