From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 14:27:41 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Visa, HNC Inc. develop neural network as a weapon to fight fraud
In-Reply-To: <9308252001.AA14017@custard.think.com>
Message-ID: <CCC2Iu.7ny@twwells.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In article <9308252001.AA14017@custard.think.com>,
Andy Wilson <ajw@Think.COM> wrote:
: [mostly bogus stuff]

That is irrelevant to cypherpunks, as I understand the list.

There is no technology, including that of privacy, that cannot be
used for ill. We don't know how they're going to be using the
neural network. They could, as was suggested, abandon their minds
and and rely on the neural net. I don't think they will because
doing so would be a really bad business decision. Furthermore, on
the evidence, the neural network output will only be used as one
datum in a process involving many inputs and a human making the
final decision. Finally, in the examples I'm familiar with (from
reading AI Expert), when a neural net is used as a decision
element, precisely because of its error rate, the decision isn't
"go/no go" but "go/refer the problem to a human".