Artificial Intelligence can’t predict a child’s future success, no matter how much data we give it
It’s difficult to predict a child’s future success; researchers conducted a mass experiment with 160 research teams to see if any of them could predict how children’s lives would turn out by trio of Princeton conducted.
They have provided fifteen years of data and were allowed to use any technique they wanted, from good old fashioned statistical analysis to modern-day artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence provides valuable insights that can help industries make the best decisions. It’s difficult to judge whether or not a child will become successful requires a level of prescience that brute-force mathematics can’t provide.
Even after having the 15years of dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model.
Artificial Intelligence can tell us what it “predicts,” but it cannot explain why. Hence, they are trying to figure out whether a child will be a success; they’re basically just guesses – and statistically speaking, not very good ones.
As per Princeton team’s aforementioned research, apart from giving the research teams a trove of data gathered over a 15-years-long “Fragile Families” study on the lives of matriculating children, nobody’s system resulted in an accurate prediction.
