It’s Time to Teach AI How to Be Forgetful

Our brain has evolved to make predictions and explanations in unstable and ill-defined situations. In 2008, Google launched Flu Trends, a web service that aimed to predict flu-related doctor visits using big data. Adopting this approach, an algorithm that relied on a single data point—predicting that next week’s flu-related doctor visits are the same as in the most recent week, for instance—would have reduced Google Flu Trends' prediction error by half. Intelligent forgetting is just one dimension of psychological AI, an approach to machine intelligence that also incorporates other features of human intelligence such as causal reasoning, intuitive psychology, and physics. Psychological AI opens up a new vision for explainable AI: Instead of trying to explain opaque complex systems, we can check first if psychological AI offers a transparent and equally accurate solution.