"There is considerable interest from policymakers and scientists around the world around how artificial intelligence is going to transform their work. In their haste to jump on the AI bandwagon, however, everybody is forgetting we have not solved some older, deeper problems about data that will stymie attempts to get the technology off the ground."
HETAN SHAHexecutive director of the Royal Statistical Society
FT 19th Aug 2019
Again a reminder that there is no shortcut to leveraging AI whether in government, public utilities or commercial enterprises. AI is not a solution it is a technology.
In parallel read "DeepMind’s losses display the challenges of the AI industry"
So far, use of AI in government has been fairly simplistic. Many applications are little more than complex algorithms based on historical data. Unaware of the challenges of design, analysis and modelling, naive users may jump in where experienced statisticians fear to tread. In fact there may be many areas where it would be both more accurate and more transparent to use old-fashioned statistics in place of opaque machine learning. For example, as a predictor of US recidivism, a complex machine-learning algorithm was no better than a simple linear-regression model.
https://www.ft.com/content/817cd3d6-b921-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c
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