Known Unknowns: Designing Uncertainty Into the AI-Powered System

Uncertainty may be a fearful state for many people, but for data scientists and developers training the next wave of AI, uncertainty may be a good thing. Designing uncertainty directly into the system could help AI focus on what experts need to leverage state of the art AI and use it to inform our world.

The Principles of Uncertainty

The entire human experience can be containerized into a series of principles. Known-knowns are things you’re aware that you know. Unknown unknowns are things you don’t know that you don’t know. For AI, the concept of known unknowns are things you know you can’t predict.

Service providers aren’t providing help with known-knowns because those are things you can simply Google an answer for. Unknown-unknowns are similarly useless because your target audience wouldn’t know to search for those things, making your product challenging to deploy. However, the two in between, known-unknowns and unknown-knows, are ripe for AI advancement.

The known-unknown can help your users make better decisions in uncertain times. The other unknown-knowns can surprise and delight your users with things you’re discovering. Sean Kruzel and his organization Astrocytefocus on known unknowns to build uncertainty into the framework to help…