Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I'll trust expert systems when I have access to the documented source code of the decision making process after the fact. With modern AI, that's practically impossible because machine learning has replaced manual algorithms in this space ages ago.

Even without AI, companies like these don't like to hand out their source code, so you wouldn't be able to trust them anyway. Programmers are not lawyers, no matter how hard we pretend to be sometimes, and unless every programmer on this project was also a judge I wouldn't trust it to advice or make any judgement. You're not going to find judges who happen to run a startup as a side-gig anyway, so let's just bin the idea.

Automated systems are great at reducing the human factor in a lot of things. For stupid factory work where human minds can be put to much more useful tasks, that's great. For the legal system, no thank you.

> I'll trust expert systems when I have access to the documented source code of the decision

FWIW, that's precisely one of the things ES are designed to do, to backtrack and introspect, to explain their decision making.

(I did a module on expert systems (blackboard models) back in 1988 when they were a hot topic)

That only applies to tree search GOFAI expert systems. If somebody strings together one using for example a BERT model for the language generation and another neural network for the reasoning, then the guardrails are no longer in place.

If a neural network is doing the reasoning, is that still an "expert system" (as the term is used in AI)?

Then that is no longer an expert system. Expert systems are systems that capture the expertise of people in rule form, they are GOFAI by nature. If it is using neural networks instead it is not an expert system.

> with modern AI

Expert systems are classic AI, often with a rule engine underpinning it. It really could not be simpler in context and this is what makes them good. Everything is simple, the knowledge in it (i.e. the codified expert opinion) is what makes it what it is.

uhm, there is source code to the networks, or where else do they come from?

The problem is not the logic, but the shear size of it. That is not at all different from any sufficiently complex piece of software that allows side effects. And the comments can be totally useless or downright misleading anyway.

Also, there may be persons who are professional in both programming and lawyering.

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