Is Machine Learning Really AI Part 2

If AI is to be a useful term to help delineate different technologies and approaches from each other, then it has to be meaningful. A term that means everything to everyone means nothing to anyone. The previous article on this series “Is Machine Learning Really AI?” went over the various perspectives on what AI has to mean to be useful. The general view is that systems are intelligent when they can sense and understand their environment, learn from past behaviors and apply that learning to future behaviors, and adapt to new circumstances by reasoning from experience and learning and then generating new learning from those new circumstances and experiences.  You can further define intelligence as being able to increase your future freedom of action, and determine on an individual basis what future outcomes you want based on actions.

Machine learning is the set of technologies and approaches that provide a means by which computer systems can encode learning from experience and data and then apply future information to that learning to come to conclusions. This machine learning is in contrast to explicit programming, where the human uses its own intelligence to accomplish all the goals of cognition. Clearly, machine learning is a prerequisite for AI.  However, ML is necessary, but not sufficient for AI. Likewise, not all ML systems are operating in the context of what we’re trying to achieve with AI.

So, Which Parts of ML are not AI?

In the above article, we talk about what parts of AI are not ML, but we didn’t dive into what parts of ML are not AI.  Since we have not yet achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), despite some attempts to get us close, all current, practical implementations of AI in the field are narrow AI of one form or another. Unfortunately this is not particularly helpful. 

It’s not useful to call a data science effort that uses random decision forests, which are a form of ML, that are focused on the specific task of achieving a very specific learning outcome to be at the same level as attempts to build systems that can learn and adapt to new situations. The tools used might be machine learning, but the outcomes are not meant to be particularly intelligent. For example, forms of predictive analytics that use the methods of machine learning might indeed be ML projects, but they are not AI projects in themselves. In essence, using ML techniques to learn one narrow specific application, and in which that training model cannot be applied to different situations or has any way to evolve or adapt to new situations is not an AI-focused ML project. It’s ML without the AI.  

Perhaps this Venn diagram might be helpful as a way of explaining which parts of ML are contributory to AI and which parts are not:

Data Science Perspective: ML for Predictive Analytics not for Intelligence

Part of why we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in the field of AI is not only the development of better algorithms to do machine learning (notably Deep Learning), but also the sheer quantity of data we have and better processing power to deal with it. Over the past decade, the field of Big Data emerged to deal with voluminous amounts of data from internet, mobile, and all manner of devices and networked systems. Not only did the Big Data revolution bring about new ways of managing and dealing with large quantities of data, but it helped usher in the fields of data science and data engineering to provide insight and hidden value in the data and better methods for manipulating large data sets.

It’s no wonder that the methods and techniques of machine learning are appealing to data scientists who have before had to deal with simply more advanced data queries using SQL and other data access approaches. ML provides a wide array of techniques, algorithms, and approaches to gain insight, provide predictive power, and further enhance the value of data in the organization, elevating data to information, and then to knowledge.

However what differentiates many data science-driven ML projects from AI-driven ML projects is that the models that are being built for these efforts and the scope of these projects are very narrowly constrained to a single problem domain, for example credit card fraud. This fascinating Quora exchange between data scientists makes it clear that the ML approaches being used are being used to solve narrow problems of predictive analytics, not greater challenges of AI. In this way, these ML projects are not AI projects, but rather predictive analytics projects. We can call this “ML for predictive analytics” as opposed to ML for AI.

Likewise, there are other narrow applications of ML for specific single-task usage, such as forms of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and even forms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) where ML approaches are used to extract valuable information from handwriting or speech. We’ve had OCR and NLP solutions for decades, and yet prior to this new AI summer wave, they’ve never called their systems AI. In this way, we can’t consider many forms of OCR and NLP, even ones that use ML approaches, to be AI. Rather, they have to be enabling some greater goal for any of these to be considered AI.

So, what is considered ML in the context of AI? 

Clearly, in order to make AI work, we need ML, but we don’t need ML models narrowly built for something like credit card fraud detection to make intelligent systems work. Rather, what we need are ML systems that enable the AI efforts to learn not only the specific models in which they are taught, but rather a framework by which these systems can learn on their own. ML in the context of AI emphasizes not only self-learning, but also the idea that this learning can be applied to new situations and circumstances that might not have been explicitly modeled, trained, or learned before. In many ways, this sort of continuous, expanding learning is the goal of adaptive systems.

Adaptation and self-learning are keys to not only handling the explicit problems of today, but also the unknown problems of tomorrow. This sort of learning is how we humans, and many other creatures, pick up new skills, learn from peers, and apply learnings from one situation to another. ML systems that are built in this way support these goals for AI and are fundamentally more complex and sophisticated than their narrower, single-task ML brethren. The key insight is that it’s not the algorithm that determines whether ML is used in an AI context or not, but rather the way it is being applied, and the sophistication of the learning systems that surround those algorithms.

Are we just nitpicking here?  Should all forms of ML be considered AI, even if they’re super narrow, data science driven, or using decades-old OCR?  Should we consider AI to be a continuum from super weak, very narrow forms to the ultimate AGI goal? Perhaps, and certainly, we see no fault with having that perspective about AI.  Regardless of your perspective, it is helpful to make the definition of AI meaningful so that we can achieve real advancement in the goals of AI, rather than using AI as the buzzword of today. Because if we do that, then AI will suffer like it did in the winters of yesterday.