One year ago today: May 15, 2017, drywalling a year ago.
Five years ago today: May 15, 2013, buddle-dee-bop.
Nine years ago today: May 15, 2009, Javascript could have been . . .
Random years ago today: May 15, 2008, I liked that shirt.
Oh boy, more pictures from the future. But only three days ahead, so don’t start buying lottery tickets on my account. This upcoming Friday, the 18th, read about this catwalk. Can you see the little black kitty-cat inside the rails? This is a clever way to get the felines out in the fresh air when they feel like it. I like the idea, a kitty skywalk.
I’m due for another bank of tests next round, which I’ll describe at that time. But encouragingly, they are increasingly tests associated with normal health checkups than treatment for earlier conditions. That’s important as Trump tackles the worst evils of the medical system abuses. He’s identified the problem that prior administrations refused to recognize—that the insurance companies are owned by a private and non-competitive special interest group.
The bakery is long gone, so proceedings we held in the Starbucks over on Park, which always makes for wasted time as the service there sucks. The worst, in my view, is the way that company labels it’s “cup” sizes. I was reminded how low-grade the Miami workforce is when I finally had to get the stupid woman to put the various “small” sizes on the counter and point, “That one.” I say again folks, that a cup is eight ounces. There is no such thing as a big cup or a small cup. But Starbucks ranks amongst the most asinine outfits over that issue. It’s a good thing for them their average customer is an idiot.
The academic topic of the meeting was the mini-flurry over Google’s move into the field of Artificial Intelligence. My presented viewpoint is that they are pursuing the wrong model, and will muck it up by creating a flawed standard, similar to what MicroSoft/IBM did with computer operating systems. People are rightfully worried, but for the wrong reasons. They are concerned about the alteration of their society, much as many pre-Internet people disliked the computerization of records. Without having the vocabulary to express their concerns, they recognized that the records would be abused.
Abandoned bridge, Ohio.
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[Author’s note: the following is a long-winded chat on AI, an outgrowth of this mornings meeting. I’m the only one left standing on the topic and I only once studied the mechanics and even that was nearly forty years ago. I won’t lug you along into a conversation about AI, but I will write on the problems I perceive in the field, especially getting the intelligence to feed back. Oddly, this harks up another field, DNA-based evolution. I’m still reading “Darwin’s Radio”, and by half-way, I cannot endorse it for casual reading. However, read the next quip before you continue and the AI comments below might make more sense.
Evolution is not completely documented. “Darwin’s Radio” has succeeding in modifying my opinion about those millions of seemingly repetitive DNA stands inside cells, which you can take that I mean human cells also and in particular. I subscribed to the theory that suggests they are human reactions to viral infections over time. And I believe that all of this could, I said could, have happened entirely without any supernatural component by cells reacting to changing environment.
I’m now changing my stance. “Darwin’s Radio” suggests, though you’ll have to read closely to get the message, that these built up DNA sequences could represent a type of memory that could, again I said could, be interpreted in several ways. Evolution presumes a process over thousands or millions of generations, with mutations and subtle changes conferring a tiny advantage at a time to the survival of the fittest. This is based on examples found, but the record is far from smooth. The few fossil and other records that are most complete suggest long-term evolution.
But now, enter that memory. What if even the failed evolutionary DNA is there? When the environment changes, the cell could look into memory to see if there is a match or solution to anything that happened in the past in order to “try that first”. Aha, no religion needed, this might explain the long periods of no change, like the ant or the cockroach. Critics who say they should have changed but didn’t is a negation of Darwin’s theory. Now, however, I see that maybe there are no fossils or records because the organism pulled an answer from it’s memory banks.
That is, maybe the change was lateral or retrograde and there is no record because it never happened. Hmmmm. Isn’t that a parallel to the single AI routine I programmed into my Apple ][e back in 1981? Personally, I would like that to emerge as the key to “intelligence”, and not these esoteric theories that are being cooked up by the universities and I would further hope it gets the Google project to fall flat on its ass.]
I have a theory of what is going wrong with AI. They [outfits like Google] are wasting resources trying to make it humanoid. The term is ‘anthropomorphization” and I feel it is a highly inefficient way to approach the matter. My tack is well-known, that new developments should be optimized to complete their designed goals. I recognize the difficulty of acceptance, but instinct tells me that is a human challenge, not a robot defect. You may recognize what I mean by considering how people will find robotic toys fun up to a point, but get paranoid if a bunch of wires defeats a chess champion.
The top element of today’s discussion was the definition of artificial intelligence. There isn’t any, at least no one that is universally agreed upon. Is a robot which the average person would find likeable necessarily intelligent? Here is where you can clearly see my thinking is that the very purpose of artificial intelligence is to make machinery, in its many forms, more autonomous. This could be wrong or possibly totally wrong. I’m suggesting maybe mankind has failed because, in the long run, this “mechanical man” has been a pursuit of many civilizations before we came along. It’s a no-go.
This connection of robot-AI is my position mainly on practical terms as I see them personally. My classic example is the bulldozer. Humans don’t have tracked undercarriages or scoops up front, so it would be foolish to design a bulldozer to be human-like just so John Doe would not be afraid of it. I say the true underlying concern is the teaming of this new form of intelligence to machines by making them eventually autonomous. I suggest they would not have to be human-like at all to do a superior job of it.
And that circles back to the definition of intelligence. I have some first-hand experience that a totally logical and intelligent entity is wrong if placed in an atmosphere where the surrounding environment is not at all logical. Think of the workplace. Any intelligence in charge over there?
The majority of humans are not driven by logic, but by an instinct that passes for acquired learning. A lifetime of consequences of avoiding the wrong moves is not my idea of a smart person. This is the point where somebody usually brings up New Age philosophies and religion. Hey, at least they provide the reason clubs like this one evolve. Afterward, I drove to the Barnes & Noble out on Flamingo to see if there are any publications that address this issue.
Yes and no. I found a few books on AI, each on a narrow path. And each was misguided by trying to be the mode that emulated human thinking rather than optimum thinking. The difference, for all their lofty wording, is in my wording the fact there exists an upper limit on human information processing ability. Even the smartest human has a maximum boundary at which information can be processed. Change that information into data (a prerequisite to making it useful as the raw material of logical manipulation) and computers just keep getting smarter and smarter. They never reach a ceiling. The more data, the smarter they get. And the more Hollywood movies you’ll see on this theme.
Worse for some, humans rarely enjoy operating at full capacity when thinking. In a personal example, when I do it, I expect to be paid extra. Part of that expectation is because of how often I am forced to defend a conclusion or viewpoint with a majority who cannot tell fact from fiction, the exact type of brainwashed clone the education system is has been churning out since the 1980s. To me, part of intelligence is the ability to spot patterns that others generally miss, or mistake. That’s been covered elsewhere.
Last on that topic for now is the brand of “intelligence” I find annoying. That is people who view all incoming information with the same degree of importance. They do not discriminate what is profound and cannot make value judgments. You know the ones, where the weather report or the announcement of the discovery of water on Mars, same thing to them. And they have no qualms supporting laws or situations that stop others with different levels of involvement. Let’s not send scientists to the Moon, they say. Let’s send one person from each race instead, aw, how cute is that?
Up in Broward all day visiting. And taking care of the inevitable surprises with my new medical provider. That would include a $94 co-pay that wasn’t there before. I read the rulebook how many times and this was never mentioned. Let’s say worse is on the way, the American medical system is totally distorted by the presence of insurance companies. Every hospital and clinic that’s thriving does so by over-billing the insurer. I’ll give you a way to watch how badly the insurance business sucks.
Guess who the biggest opponent of driverless cars is? Right—the auto insurance industry. It is parallel to medical insurance, with the difference that auto insurance has been compulsory for decades. The rot has had time to corrupt everything from vehicle safety rules to the court and police systems. The corruption ranges up and down the entire spectrum, from prison construction, to emergency clinics, to credit scores. Forced insurance upsets the law of supply and demand. Driverless cars represent a major, major threat to the way those bastards do business.
ADDENDUM
I was back to get a renewal prescription, so my diet reverted to half-rations for ten day run-up period to my appointment. Regardless that my intake was 800-1,000 calories per day during that period, I gained back five full pounds. No, it is not water. I have a scale that measure body fat and so far it has proven uncomfortably accurate.
The photo? It’s there because I thought you needed one. It’s a still from a video I took of the cat room door. Watch for a repeat because I have no filing system for photos, and I’ve even worse for snaps taken from videos.
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