Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behaviour

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):681-712 (2023)
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Abstract

The last 5 years have seen a series of remarkable achievements in deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence research, and some modellers have argued that their performance compares favourably to human cognition. Critics, however, have argued that processing in deep neural networks is unlike human cognition for four reasons: they are (i) data-hungry, (ii) brittle, and (iii) inscrutable black boxes that merely (iv) reward-hack rather than learn real solutions to problems. This article rebuts these criticisms by exposing comparative bias within them, in the process extracting some more general lessons that may also be useful for future debates.

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Cameron Buckner
University of Houston

References found in this work

Intelligence without representation.Rodney A. Brooks - 1991 - Artificial Intelligence 47 (1--3):139-159.
On the proper treatment of connectionism.Paul Smolensky - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):1-23.
Psychologism and behaviorism.Ned Block - 1981 - Philosophical Review 90 (1):5-43.

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