Scientist to Hollywood: Artificial Intelligence Doesn't Work the Way You Think it Does

As movie audiences anticipate the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger to his signature role as the original Terminator in November -- yes, he WILL be back -- scientist and rising star in the Artificial Intelligence world Matt Allen has a few thoughts for filmmakers about how AI is depicted in popular culture. His main point is "You're getting it all wrong." "Machine Learning is a popular buzzword, and a powerful tool," said Allen, who has co-authored two articles on AI for the American Chemical Society Nano and Nature Biomedical Engineering, including one on how AI can be used to help detect cancer early in patients who may not even be showing symptoms. "However, no matter how you slice it, machines do not learn. Machine Learning (ML) was named as such in the pursuit of machines that could learn like humans. The furthest we have come in that regard is an optimization procedure wherein at each step during the "training process" a "model" gets slightly better at whatever the task is. This procedure is definitively not "learning". The incremental improvements made by a model may seem intuitively similar to the incremental improvements that humans make when learning to do something new, but the similarities end there."