Security News > 2023 > December > AI and Lossy Bottlenecks

AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar, call this AI overcoming "Lossy bottlenecks." Lossy is a term from information theory that refers to imperfect communications channels-that is, channels that lose information.

By storing rich representations of people's preferences and histories on the demand side, along with equally rich representations of capabilities, costs and creative possibilities on the supply side, AI systems enable complex customization at scale and low cost.

An AI system with access to, for example, a student's coursework, exams and teacher feedback as well as detailed information about possible jobs could provide much richer assessments of which employment matches do and don't make sense.

Imagine a system where AI removes this lossy bottleneck.

Combined with AI systems that personalize political education, it could encourage more people to participate in the democratic process and increase political engagement.

A world without artificial bottlenecks comes with risks-loss of jobs in the bottlenecks, for example-but it also has the potential to free people from the straitjackets that have long constrained large-scale human decision-making.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-lossy-bottlenecks.html