From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 19:12:17 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Visa, HNC Inc. develop neural network as a weapon to fight fraud
In-Reply-To: <9308252250.AA17771@custard.think.com>
Message-ID: <CCCEF6.9rz@twwells.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In article <9308252250.AA17771@custard.think.com>,
Andy Wilson <ajw@Think.COM> wrote:
:    Andy Wilson <ajw@Think.COM> wrote:
:    : [mostly bogus stuff]
:
:    That is irrelevant to cypherpunks, as I understand the list.
:
: The prospect of the impossibility of anonymity and the uses
: to which personal information is made in a cashless economy is
: not relevant?

But that wasn't what you were writing about. You were writing
about bad business decisions, not violations of privacy.

For that matter, your notions on neural networks seem
contradictory. On the one hand, you complain about a violation of
privacy and on the other you complain that a neural network won't
tell you how it reached its conclusions!

:                I beg to differ.  This is exactly what digital
: cash is meant to prevent.

Digital cash and the use of neural networks to authenticate
transactions are essentially orthogonal issues.

: The problem with referring a neural network's decision to a human
: is that the neural network gives no information other than the
: probability of fraud.

1) This statement is false. It is true of some neural networks
   but not all. We have no way of knowing whether their neural
   network is among those.

2) A problem with *any* decision system is that people may place
   an unsupportable weight on some particular piece of evidence.
   Your "problem" is not that (some) neural networks give answers
   that can't be interpreted but that some people will use their
   answers in an inappropriate way.

Blaming neural networks for bad *human* decision making is just
plain silly.

:                                                     There is not any
: good way to combine the judgement of the neural net with that of a
: human for that reason.

Nonsense. As the existence of rule based systems that incorporate
neural networks shows.

: With respect,  I have found AI Expert to consist more of marketing
: hype than correct and useful information on artificial intelligence
: technology.

Oh, goodie, an ad hominem argument.

But, as it happens, it is because AI Expert is so commercially
oriented that it is an appropriate reference. It speaks to how,
and why, AI gets deployed in business and that makes it just the
right place to go.