Beyond Nodding & Pointing: Widening Explainable and Advisable Human-AI Interaction
Keynote given at IIIT Hyderabad 3/20/2023 on the occasion of F C Kohli Day.
[Video excerpted from Kohli Day live stream at • F C Kohli Day 2023
Abstract: Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While alternatives such as neuro-symbolic approaches have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on what they are about. There are often two independent motivations (i) symbols as a lingua franca for human-AI interaction and (ii) symbols as system-produced abstractions used by the AI system in its internal reasoning. The jury is still out on whether AI systems will need to use symbols in their internal reasoning to achieve general intelligence capabilities. Whatever the answer there is, the need for (human-understandable) symbols in human-AI interaction seems quite compelling. In particular, humans would be interested in providing explicit (symbolic) knowledge and advice -- and expect machine explanations in kind. This alone requires AI systems to maintain a symbolic interface for interaction with humans. In this talk, I will motivate this point of view, and describe recent efforts in our research group along this direction.