Tina Eliassi-Rad

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154 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Tina Eliassi-Rad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 301 | Tina Eliassi-Rad on Al, Networks, and Epistemic Instability · 13 Jan 2025 podcast

And so right now, the way that we're representing psychology, the knowledge or like what, you know, these things as vectors. Cause I'm a computer scientist.

Basically how much does this vector space move in one direction versus another? So as you talk with others, so you can build these like kind of simulations, right? Not kind of, you can build these simulations in terms of, in terms of conversations and see how much the vector space shifts.

Yeah. So there's a book by Ladyman and Wiesner. And I know that you had James Ladyman on your podcast as well. He's a philosopher at Bristol. And Caroline Wiesner is a mathematician at Potsdam now.

uh about what is a complex system and their book uh that came out i think in 2020 talked about complex systems in terms of features and how there are certain like necessary features and there are certain like emergent features and then there's some functional features where like for example our human brain is a complex system and as you were saying like if it has a shock it adapts and it still perhaps can function unless the shock is like catastrophic

And so what we are not seeing, if we tie this to, for example, the AI models and how they are operating within this system, is we don't know even the role of this AI system, like how much instability is it causing in the system, right? How much feedback is it causing in the system? How much memory does it have? Right. Because they're evolving so quickly that it's not it's not quite clear.

So this is like an open area of study of like going through these different features of a complex system and trying to see, OK, well, how do I measure it for, let's say, a chat GPT? Right.

In fact, a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it doesn't have a good memory. based on like what I told it yesterday kind of a thing, right? So memory is one of those features that a complex system has.

Yeah, I think where it comes in, in fact, this is how it links to my new project on epistemic instability, is that it introduces epistemic instability, right? Like when my dad was getting his PhD in America back in the 60s, the most trusted man in America was Walter Cronkite, right? If he said something, you believed him. Now we don't have such a thing, right?

We don't have a person or an institution where you say, okay, I read it here and I believe it. And then there's also like, depending on where you are on the left or the right, you're like, maybe you believe New York Times, you believe Fox News. And so because of that, I feel like one of the things that we need to do if we value our democracy is teach our kids critical thinking, right?

It's just like, Don't believe what you read or what you hear. Question it, right? Does it make sense? Talk to different people and make your own decision and don't give up your agency. But that's a hard task, right? Thinking is not easy and people don't want to think in the age of TikTok.

I think there was less distraction for sure, right, than it is now. I think the dopamine hit that we get by just scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, is something that has been studied. And, you know, I'm not a psychologist or a cognitive scientist, but that people, it's just like you let your brain go to mush and you just like spend hours on it instead of,

maybe actually sitting quietly and thinking about a problem, you know, it's boring, you know?

Yeah, in fact, that's such a perfect thing. I always say to my students, what is your objective function? Because we all have an objective function, and that objective function changes over time. And perhaps if all of us just think, okay, did my objective function change from yesterday or from last month or whatever? You know, it would be helpful for society.

So as a computer scientist, as a machine learning person, I always think about objective functions. And in fact, I cannot look at a mountain range now and not think, OK, if you drop me there, will I find the peak or not? The global peak? Probably not. But, you know, like, please drop me at a nice place.

So the gradient is with me.

I mean, as an introvert, I'm fine with it. But yeah, no, I think we see this in society now where like people aren't,

um as good as interacting with other people or they're not as not as courteous to other people perhaps as before i don't know maybe i'm out of an age now where i'm like oh yeah people are not as courteous as they were before um but you know the more you interact with people the better you get at them unless you interact with them the worse you get at them and so if we don't put a premium on like oh look like tina can't actually pick up the

As opposed to just sending a zillion emails or text messages. I think there's a value to that. And I think there is this notion of trust. Even the most introvert among us, there are a few people that we do trust. And so if it comes to a point where you trust an AI system that we don't know how it works and that it's vulnerable to attacks, then that is a problem, right?

And so, in fact, this gets us to this phrase called the red teaming that we hear all the time now that, oh, well, don't worry about it. They will red team it. And so the phrase red teaming came from the Cold War era, right? So the Soviet Union, the red team, America, the blue team, right? So, and there was a lot of this red team, blue teaming, for example, for cybersecurity, right?

But this phrase red teaming is not well defined when it comes to these generative AI systems. And my friend and colleague, Professor Hoda Hedari at Carnegie Mellon has written extensively about this because there's no guarantee, right? So you cannot guarantee that somebody cannot jailbreak chat GPT. And jailbreaking is basically that chat GPT has put in some information kind of guardrails, right?

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