Robust AI

Opening — Why this matters now Most AI deployment failures do not arrive wearing a villain costume. They arrive as a camera calibration shift, a slightly worse classifier, a sensor that ages badly, a document parser that misses one field more often than expected, or a retrieval layer that suddenly sees the wrong context with impressive confidence. The policy may still be “the same.” The world it observes is not. ...

Risk has a habit of entering business systems through small numbers. A transition probability is estimated from limited data. A demand forecast has a confidence band. A robot’s next state is not exactly known. A credit, logistics, or inventory model says, “Here is the most likely transition matrix,” and then reality replies, with admirable lack of manners, “Cute.” ...