Artificial Energy - part the third

Last night "60 Minutes" re-ran its segments, amongst which was one Geoffery Hinton, self-proclaimed Father of AI, and who waxed outrageously on AI taking over the world. Much like The Musk Ox saying that AI will take all the jobs and some 'Socialist' income/wealth re-distribution must ensue if We are to survive. Of course, he's not hesitant to de-hire folks if they are a burden to his profit. Sauce for the goose, and all that.

Back to Hinton. He went on and on about neural networks, and how mysterious they are, but that they work. Not one word about hallucinating or just plain lying. Not one word about the foundational maths involved. The mind of a zealot. So, once again, here's what neural nets are really all about

The mean squared errors between these calculated outputs and the given target values are minimized by creating an adjustment to the weights. This technique has been known for over two centuries as the method of least squares or linear regression. It was used as a means of finding a good rough linear fit to a set of points by Legendre (1805) and Gauss (1795) for the prediction of planetary movement.

For all the evangelical handwaving about NN and AI and other such blathering about the Emperor's New Clothes, a fact is just a fact: computers work on numerical data, not pictures (despite what may seem apparent), and optimization is just minimizing squared differences. So long as we live in a Euclidean World of Data, that's the sole choice. Which, of course, is not a choice.

NN and AI are based on predicting the Future from the Past (Data). If you want to predict the Future, your best bet is to read the NYT from a point in time which reflects the emerging Future. There always will be one, in that human behavior hasn't changed much since before The Bible was written by an aggressive sect of proto-heathens eager to explain the unexplained. In a way which benefited the writers over others. Of course.

There's a reason Times Series Analysts mostly get it wrong: hockey stick data isn't apparent until you've climbed up to the label. For all the time before that, the data looks lazily linear. "Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about." Gotcha!!!

Stupid Alzheimer's Ronnie, II and Covid-19,

The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.
-- 26 Feb. 2020

Elect him again, and he'll force everyone, not just the myriad Schedule F dick suckers who'll invade the Damn Gummint, to be just as idiotic. And solely to benefit him and his cabal. Well, only the most loyal of them, of course.

And, once again, the Federal Civil Service was created just because the Spoils System of the 19th century got a President killed. Let's party like it's 1829 with Andy Jackson!!!