Thank you, Niels. Beyond the AI comparisons, I think it may be a core feature of any AI in the future that it be trusted in its words and actions. I suspect other benchmarks will come to be as important to average users as the browser wars were to consumers in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Around 2017, Waymo introduced in-car feedback explicitly to build trust with riders. According to Waymo’s article, “Trusting Driverless Cars” ( Taming the Road: How Self-Driving Cars Earn Your Trust ), they added visual and audio feedback to show that the car was aware of important things (e.g., pedestrians, cyclists, cones, crosswalks, other cars, etc.). And they had the car give explanations for its decisions in real time as well (e.g., telling the rider it’s waiting for pedestrians or stopped for a railroad crossing). All of it was a bit of useful and clever trickery. Waymo had to fake it with UI; you can do it for real with the TBT architecture built into Monty.
The thing about “trusting the technology” that I want to emphasize is that TBT offers an unprecedented look inside the black box of the human mind. And consequently, Monty can address the trust issue head-on. Other knowledge agents–machine and human–may appear smart in ways that mask mere cleverness." I want my doctor to say “I don’t know” when they truly don’t know and not repeat word patterns that only serve to deflect my inquiry. Explaining one’s decisions and assessments at a level appropriate to the audience’s level of understanding is part of building confidence that the expert understands what they are saying and knows what they are doing. It’s what expert humans do, and I think Monty may be uniquely positioned to do it as well.
Sorry for going on, but I sometimes see things through the lens of my past life studying epistemology. Right now, I see the knowledge aspect of Monty as being more than a compelling feature. It could be something more defining and evident to people deciding whether to trust an AI that seems accurate on the surface. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—“People know ‘warranted knowledge’ when they see it.” And when they hear Monty explain why it directed a move to verify a structure, they’ll know they’ve found it.
– Bryce