#Goldilocks ever after high software#

Some are demonstrably puzzled that any firm would want to offer a bounty to find bugs (or, in this case, AI biases) in their systems. I realize that I am mainly aiming to talk about AI biases in bounty hunting in this discussion, but there are some quite relevant parallels to the bug bounty arena.

Let’s dig more deeply into the bug bounty topic. Department of Defense (DoD) got into the act by having a “Hack the Pentagon” bounty effort (note that the publicly focused bounty was for bugs found in various DoD-related websites and not in defense mission-critical systems). Google and Facebook had each opted toward bounty hunting for bugs starting in 20 years, respectively.

#Goldilocks ever after high software#

In more modern times, you might be aware that in the 1980s there were some notable bounties offered to find computer bugs or errors in off-the-shelf software packages and then in the 1990’s Netscape markedly offered a bounty for finding bugs in their web browser (becoming one of the most prominent firms of that day to do so).

Sorry to say that we don’t know if any bounty hunter found the copper pot and claimed the bronze coins, but we do know that bounty hunting has certainly continued since those ancient times. The reward for the recovery of the copper pot was an impressive prize of sixty-five bronze coins. Reportedly, a posted message during the Roman Empire in the city of Pompeii proclaimed that bounty hunters were needed to find a copper pot that went missing from a small shop. Here’s a fascinating piece of historical trivia for you. Using consultants is an option if you have the budget for it.īounty programs have existed since at least the time of the Romans and thus we might surmise that they do work, having successfully endured as a practice over all of these years. You need to then have them rummage around, which might take an untold number of costly laborious hours. Realize that you need to pay for them to come up to speed with your AI system. Turns out that consultants will happily scrutinize your AI for biases, charging you a pretty penny to do so (lots and lots of pennies). Okay, so go ahead and hire outside consultants to do the dirty work for you, as it were. Lots of other such reasons might seem to undercut having the AI developers take on this task, including lack of skills to figure out the embedded biases, lack of time in a project to do so, etc. Or they might be so excited about the AI and have a sense of self-pride about it that to have to then take a critical eye to examine it for biases would be difficult and a real downer. The thing is, they might be so mired in biases that they themselves cannot recognize the biases within their concocted AI. You might entrust the AI developers that devised the AI to do so. How are we to discover that a particular AI system has biases?