Don’t throw the AI baby out with the data leakage bath water: Reading “AI Snake Oil” with a spirit of optimism
The privacy-cyber world seems preoccupied with issues related to the nexus between personal data and AI. Those issues, although important, are dwarfed by a more pressing and fundamental question: can we get AI to do useful things reliably and accurately in the realm of predicting significant human outcomes, such as health, criminal propensity, credit risk etc. (“Predictive AI”)? Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two luminaries in the AI field from Princeton University, suggest the answer is “No” and they make their case in AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t and How to Tell the Difference. Although we very much recommend the book—as it is excellent—we think the thesis is too pessimistic. Companies should not “throw the baby out with the bathwater” but instead distill the precepts that will allow for development of a more rigorous predictive AI that avoids known pitfalls.