Ask Dumb Questions

Ask enough questions and you will notuce they are getting smarter.

When AI Asks Dumb Questions, It Gets Smart Fast   In Science, September 22, 2022

New research suggests patiently correcting artificial intelligence (AI) when it asks dumb questions may be key to helping the technology learn.

Stanford University scientists trained a machine learning AI to identify gaps in its knowledge, as well as to formulate often-stupid questions about images that strangers would answer.

When people responded, the system received feedback prompting it to adjust its inner mechanisms to behave similarly in the future; the researchers also "rewarded" the AI for writing smart questions to which humans responded.

The AI absorbed lessons in language and social norms over time, refining its ability to compose sensible and easily answerable queries.

The researchers said the system's accuracy at answering questions similar to those it had asked improved 118% over eight months and across more than 200,000 questions ...

Many AI systems become smarter by relying on a brute-force method called machine learning: they find patterns in data to, say, figure out what a chair looks like after analyzing thousands of pictures of furniture. ... 

From Science

Beyond Interpretability, Towards Language

Yes, with training in the questions we need to ask to shape the results we need for a given context. Not always easy. 

Beyond Interpretability: Developing a Language to Shape Our Relationships with AI  By Medium, May 9, 2022 in CACM

By Been Kim, Google Research, Brain Team

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a tool; we will be influenced by it, and that will influence the next generation of AI. Without a language to meaningfully communicate with it, we do not understand its decisions and, therefore, will not know what we are creating.

Building a language to communicate with AI will not be easy, but it is the only way to gain control of the way we want to live. Languages shape the way we think. We have an opportunity to shape our own thinking and future machines.

From Medium  

Questions are the Answer

Have always believed in the premise of this book.    Leaders .... students .... citizens .... everyone should ask more questions.

Q&A: Why business leaders should — yes — ask questions
MIT Sloan’s Hal Gregersen talks about his new book, “Questions Are the Answer.”

By Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office 
December 18, 2018

Should business leaders spend more time asking questions? Hal Gregersen has a firm answer to that: Yes. Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and a senior lecturer on leadership and innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying executives for decades. Time and again, he has noticed, the most successful managers are among the most inquisitive people in business. Now Gregersen has synthesized his observations on the subject in a new book, “Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life,” published by HarperCollins. MIT News sat down with Gregersen to, well, ask him about the new book.  .... " 

Asking Questions to Gather Knowledge

The Game of Questions, once again looking at a means of questioning to gather knowledge ... we explored this idea from a game perspective.

Back in 2013, posted about this:

https://eponymouspickle.blogspot.com/2013/09/asking-questions-to-tell-story.html

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/09/questions-is-game-that-is-played-by.html

Question Bursts

Never liked classic brainstorming, here a somewhat different take.  Its on the list to try

Here's How 'Question Bursts Make Better Brainstorms
Tempering Your Urge to Give all the Answers can Lead to better ones.    ByTom Relihan in MIT Sloan.

When faced with a question, the impulse is to spit out an answer. But asking more and better questions can sometimes get you further. ....

It’s among the largest of projects that Ling Xiang, a director of product management at Oracle, has encountered: helping to lead an organizational change that is part of the company’s transformation from a software developer into a cloud-based service provider.

The transition will require bucking old ways of thinking to adopt new ones. But Xiang expects such a drastic shift won’t come without some measure of resistance, and figuring out how to overcome it will require that she, too, explore new leadership methods and avenues of thought to ensure everyone comes on board.

Such outside-the-box thinking doesn’t come easy when you’ve been deeply involved in a project and may be locked into your own perceptions of the situation. That’s where Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, comes in.

For Gregersen, finding solutions to challenges like Xiang’s doesn’t so much lay in thinking up answers as it does in just asking the right questions — lots of them, at a rapid clip. The method was highlighted in a recent article by Gregersen in Harvard Business Review.

Xiang, a candidate in MIT Sloan’s Executive MBA program, experienced the practice — which Gregersen calls a “question burst” — firsthand. She pitched her challenge to two fellow students, and then sat back and took on the role of scribe as they pelted her with question after question. She wasn’t allowed to answer any of them — only to record them one-by-one, verbatim.  ... "