Understanding AI and Cognitive Bias

Cognitive biases are the focus of this episode of The AI Minute. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://amzn.to/2vgENbn... Transcript: We each have hundreds of cognitive biases. That’s where the brain arrives at a potentially incorrect answer because it has certain built-in preferences. My favorite is one the “rhyme-as-reason effect.” Because of it, a statement is regarded as more accurate if it rhymes. Anybody born before 1980 remembers Johnnie Cochran’s oft-repeated statement about the glove in the O. J. Simpson trial: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Perhaps these biases are not bugs in our brains but serve very real purposes. Maybe they only look irrational from a certain point of view. I have often thought that if entrepreneurs knew their real chances for success, vastly fewer enterprises would be undertaken. But because of something called the optimism bias, entrepreneurs think, “Sure, most businesses fail, but mine won’t!” This actually might be the optimal choice from a societal point of view. Would an AI develop its own cognitive biases? Or, would it inherit ours? Or neither? It would be delightful, wouldn’t it, if the way we kept ahead of the computers is that we make individual irrational decisions that they would never make? http://bit.ly/2vGlxUT gigaom May 06, 2019 at 04:10PM