Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Artificial Intelligence

  • AI black box magic

    Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…

  • Generative AI instead of search

    About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…

  • Human hallucinations

    Listened to a Marketplace Tech episode about AI backed banking chatbots. A line caught my attention.: Sometimes people characterize made-up statements as hallucinations. I think that’s giving a little too much humanity to a robot, but if you would be comfortable with a teller just fully making something up to a member of the public,…

  • Personalization modes

    In shopping for Mother’s Day the algorithms now think I am female. Obviously, they took the items I looked at for this quest and incorporated them into my profile’s records and are basing new recommendations on them. They are fresher. And they have left over inventory they want to move. So, I get it. This…

  • Skynet for school shooting prediction

    This sounds likely to be fraught with false positives. In particular, the language a student uses during an interview can help distinguish a high-risk teenager [shooter] from a low-risk one, according to previous research Barzman directed. That study concluded that the former was more likely to express negative feelings about himself and about the acts…

  • Hard Work

    The CEO of Basecamp wrote about his definition of “hard work” being the work others do not want to do like construction, farming, cleaning, etc. Manual labor is hard. Six years ago, Georgia made a law making it easier for law enforcement to catch undocumented residents. People left the state. They experimented with… … Out of…

  • I know Kung Fu!

    (No, not really.) What If We Could Upload Books to Our Brains?: At this point [Neil deGrasse] Tyson interjected: Are you saying we could just upload “War and Peace”? Yes, Kurzweil answered: “We will connect to neocortical hierarchies in cloud with pre-loaded knowledge.” There is a scene in The Matrix where the program for Kung…

  • IBM Watson Personality Insights

    Back in 2010, I did a post on I Write Like which reported the author most similar to a writing sample. I gave it several samples for which it gave me several different authors. The trend I noticed was the topic of the sample seemed to predict the result. IBM Watson Personality Insights : uses linguistic analytics…

  • Slackers and IT

    Go read “Science Fiction Is for Slackers.” As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk…