Artificial intelligence is struggling to cope with how the world has changed ZDNet

From our attitude towards work to our grasp of what two metres look like, the coronavirus pandemic has made us rethink how we see the world. But while we've found it hard to adjust to the new reality, it's been even harder for the narrowly-designed artificial intelligence models that have been created to help organisation make decisions. Based on data that described the world before the crisis, these won't be making correct predictions anymore, pointing to a fundamental problem in they way AI is being designed. David Cox, IBM director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, explains that faulty AI is particularly problematic in the case of so-called black box predictive models: those algorithms which work in ways that are not visible, or understandable, to the user. "It's very dangerous," Cox says, "if you don't understand what's going on internally within a model in which you shovel data on one end to get a result on the other end. The model is supposed to embody the structure of the world, but there is no guarantee that it will keep working if the world changes."