Deja Vu All Over Again - part the fifth

Dedicated reader will recall the inference about Mad Dictator Don's demolishing of much of federal governance: there will be no social goods or services in his USofA. Not even weather

Some in the weather industry — and free-market Republicans — see NOAA's forecasting work as a prime candidate for outsourcing and have called for the agency to be "dismantled." NOAA is also a target of the fossil fuel industry because its scientists contribute important climate change research. The White House has proposed $2 billion in cuts to the agency, or 28 percent of its budget.

You're a sod buster, and you want to know how the summer's gonna go?? That'll be $1,000 a month. Ya wanna know if your kiddies will be swept away in a flood? Every penny you've got. God damn it.
Enter, stage right, AI:

Even as these A.I. forecasts begin to outperform traditional methods, their developers don't fully understand how they work. The software could be learning physics, simply matching patterns or using some effective combination of the two.

"When you do a physics-based model, you're being smart," Mr. Creus-Costa said. "When you do a deep learning model, you don't have to be smart. We're not writing down the physics. We're just having it learn."

Well... they're lying. They do know how they work. What they don't know is whether how they work makes for true results. The myriad of hallucinations is enough proof of that. Correlcation is not causation. You heard that one Day 1 of Baby Stats 101. It's still true.

Has it ever occurred to anyone else that, if it's really true that all of these AI vendors have each scraped every last scrap of bytes from the innterTubes, why do we need multiple, redundant copies? Each scarfing up enough wee little electrons to run thousands of normal, middle class homes. Is there a point to that? I mean, beyond making PC vendors (mostly in China, of course) richer? Isn't that stock of innterTubes shit some kind of Social Good?

Are these compute kiddies ever going to figure out that AI has no intelligence? It's just correlation among old data. Nothing Intelligent there. As always: can AI intuit special relativity from the fact of a tram moving away from an early 20^th century tram? No fucking way. Or, as one of the 'innovators' in private weather put it

"I have my personal philosophies that are not aligned with, like, what's best for our private weather company," Mr. Dean told me. "You don't want to live in this capitalist nightmare of like, 'Pay 10 bucks for today's weather.' That's too far."

And you have to know that Dean is off by at least an order of magnitude.