Watson restrained: IBM reveals how it deliberately holds back its AI system

Machine learning is restricted to stop it "losing control" admits Europe CTO

IBM's Watson AI product is mostly rolled out live with machine learning halted to avoid "losing control" of its behaviour, Europe CTO Duncan Anderson has confirmed.

Anderson said the idea of AI always learning and adjusting its behaviour is still something people are "a bit nervous about".

"At the moment, you stop the learning before it goes live, so you don't get any surprises," Anderson told Computing at our Big Data & Analytics Summit 2016 in London.

"You instead do a training plan once a month."

The aim, explained Anderson, is to "get a sensible kind of answer" from an AI in line with the business's expectations. He added that Watson's modular-based learning updates are now so advanced in specific areas of industry that it's now possible to sell "off the shelf" versions of the AI that can immediately get to grips with traditional tasks in a given area.

The key to letting Watson learn, said Anderson, is to make the customer "confident about the way a system behaves, particularly if you're in a regulated industry like healthcare or financial services".

"What those sorts of industries can't have is a situation where the system dynamically learns at the end of the day based on interaction, and therefore goes off in a direction nobody expects, and starts giving wrong answers," said Anderson.

"There's worries about what happens if the system starts to learn on its own, you kind of lose control of what it's going to say, and people are uncomfortable about that."

But Anderson said he believes that as AI technology such as Watson "matures" and as human beings "become more familiar with using this kind of stuff", the fear factor may diminish and Watson may be slowly freed of its intellectual shackles.

"In the end, it's only similar to me employing you to do a job, and I could teach you about the job, but then you might say something stupid down the line, and there's nothing we can do about that," said Anderson.