We Can't Understand AI Using our Existing Vocabulary

Understand

This position paper argues that, in order to understand AI, we cannot rely on our existing vocabulary of human words.

• Instead, we should strive to develop neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn.
• We start from the premise that humans and machines have differing concepts.
• This means interpretability can be framed as a communication problem: humans must be able to reference and control machine concepts, and communicate human concepts to machines.