Artificial Energy - part the second

What's it gonna be now?
How willful things are building insight
-- The Byrds/1968

Once again, into the fray.

Let's start with a piece from a couple of years ago. Naturally, the writer and I see eye to eye.

The first episode dealt with AI in healthcare, one of the areas that was to be The Killer App for AI and HPC. Hasn't happened, instead we get ChatGPT, and an uproar. Why is that?

So, what happened? IBM's Big Deal, Watson Healthcare, was supposed to be the primo example of The Killer App. IBM sold it off for the price of a ham sandwich and a bag of crisps.

We've ended up with ChatGPT, which works by sticking its data straw deeply into the innterTubes, and thus sucks up the equivalent of the bottom of a septic tank. It's been, to quote Dr. McElhone, 'intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer', that the RRW are more adept at spreading their poison in the innterTubes than the progressives. A horde of Johnny Rottenseeds.

Since these bots have no real intelligence, they feed on filth and spit it back.

Were I building an AI machine (and I'm surely not), it would surely not rely only on a correlation engine. In front of that would be a deterministic engine, aka RM, aka SQL database. It would store the fixed and known connections between entities in the real world, and would override the shit from the bottom of the septic tank. But, alas, AI is the product of coders, not data mavens, so they're exclusively concerned with writing 'cool code'.

AI has been shown to be helpful in narrowly focused realms, like health diagnosis, but feeding on the dregs of the RRW on matters of anything else? Well, boy howdy, walking right into their honey trap. Just try to shut them up.

And, btw, even in healthcare, there be dragons.

On the 17th day, her Medicare Advantage insurer, Security Health Plan, followed the algorithm and cut off payment for her care, concluding she was ready to return to the apartment where she lived alone. Meanwhile, medical notes in June 2019 showed Walter's pain was maxing out the scales and that she could not dress herself, go to the bathroom, or even push a walker without help.
...
Walter died shortly before Christmas last year.