First Blog

  What to Do About AI in Colleges? There is a growing perception among students that ChatGPT can answer any question they have. This feeling extends to young professionals as well. Faculty must address this significant issue, perhaps even more urgently than traditional political problems. Let’s explore this further. Mathematics With the advent of tools like Maple and Mathematica*, students quickly realized these tools could solve many well-defined problems. These specialized AI tools are continually improving. Students understand this but accept that they must learn the techniques to pass their courses. Engineering Until recently, AI did not perform well on some engineering exams, but its capabilities are improving. Despite this, students believe AI will be available when needed in the future. As with math classes, students still comply and learn the material. Practical Application What students often fail to see is that in practice, problems are not simply presented; they must be cr

The Challenges of Complexity in the Future The emergence of a new class of problems - complexity - poses significant challenges for future science and just about everything else knowledge-based. These problems are characterized by their inherent difficulty and the multitude of possible solutions, none of which can be guaranteed to be correct or optimal. When a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it becomes possible to discern any pattern one chooses to see. Furthermore, these patterns can be convincingly proven through both data and analysis. For instance, economists and social scientists can derive different, yet provable, patterns within the economy and human cultures, leading to vastly different predictions. This multitude of solutions renders the problems of complexity seemingly impossible to solve definitively. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will likely exacerbate this issue. With access to comprehensive knowledge, AI systems will identify even more patterns, guided

 TOO MUCH PLEASURE ...  If AI (Artificial Intelligence) had been available only two centuries ago, it would have advised bloodletting as the treatment for fever.   Too much pleasure becomes pain.   Riddle: What is stronger than democracy, communism, kingship, and dictatorship? Answer: Corruption. Once begun, it reproduces. It’s forever.   If you never had the brain in the first place, no number of memory improvement pills will help.   Three types of risk: a. Risks you are willing to take, b. Risks you are not willing to take, and c. Risks you don’t know you’re taking.   The no-man’s land between science and theology is called philosophy. --- Bertrand Russell.   Every great philosopher takes a crack at defining truth . All have failed.   The two qualities of a successful theory are (A) It is predictive, and (B) It explains new phenomena.

Surviving AI. The people smart enough to ask the right questions will survive the AI invasion. This implies the need to read the AI answers and determine what’s missing. Or is the answer relevant, or is the answer biased, or is the answer wrong? So, don’t throw away those books just yet. Keep sharp. Keep connected. Keep reading. Know what you’re doing. Know what’s important. Know what the problem truly is. Know how to solve problems. In general, up your AI survival ante. Remember: If you don’t know it’s there, you won’t know what to ask about. AI is not substitute intelligence , it is after all only artificial and just supplementary.

The Four Dangers of AI  OpenAI and other codes are now giving answers to questions that would make scholars proud. They are literate, organized, and work tirelessly. They even come up with unpredictable answers even their programmers don’t understand. AI codes with only millions of parameters do not exhibit this, but those with billions of parameters have produced unexpected results, something like overnight. Apparently, the baby’s brain develops in leaps and bounds according to neuroscientists as the brain develops functionality. AI is just a baby or maybe a toddler. Billions of parameters are approaching our brain’s capabilities. So perhaps the LLMs are beginning an assault on humans at a basic level. Here we summarize the four most fundamental dangers of AI. A. The biggest danger is  trust . When medical diagnostic programs become standard, what doctor will have the courage to contravene?  Imagine a government trusting LLMs for making decisions. It is then, as they say, "in t

  Will we witness the end of the legal profession in our days? With the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence), there comes a serious challenge to this profession that celebrates its precision and logical arguments, almost always based on precedent. Let’s consider a few cases.   It seems certain that future lawyers will bring an AI assistant into the courtroom. It will listen to all testimony, look for irregularities, signal objection events, point out exceptions (with references), and help deliver closing arguments. Do you agree? The law office of the future will need no paralegals. AI will develop all the background knowledge the attorney of record needs. It will supply appropriate quotes with references. It will cite tangential issues, how they were decided, and accompanying arguments. The future law office will have no space for a law library – it being online in every office. Attorneys will dictate and AI will compose their letters in the correct legal language. The trusty leg

  A Conversation between a Human and ChatGPT by Don Allen It’s time to compare humans with ChatGPT and/or any of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning codes now coming on the market. They look promising for AI, but for humans, the nature of intellectual contributions seems limited to those only of geniuses. Only for the more emotional topics do humans have an edge. Much talk these days have been given to the so-called Kurzweil’s Singularity [1] , the time when the computer’s ability exceeds that of humans. Kurzweil suggests the year 2045; it could come sooner. However, few ever discuss that computers with AI are a brand new species having little need for human functionality.   For example, humans talk plenty about love. AI does not need or even comprehend love. In our conversation below, we combine all known AI programs, but that is a mere detail overcome by simple links. We show differences and biases. Note that biases are perhaps the only component of human thinking, throug

  Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a new religion? I wouldn't go so fare as envisioning AI as a religion, but I would support a massive advance toward intellectual dependency, much like an addictive drug. Knowledge workers will be replaced; Medical diagnoses will first be within the "circuits" of machine learning (cf. ELIZA*). Teaching will become an AI learning App. And many more. Here is a litmus test for AI addiction, and in particular for tools like ChatGPT. When the colleges begin offering courses on how to use these tools, the dependency becomes revealed as firmly entrenched. *   ELIZA  is an early  natural language processing  computer program  created from 1964 to 1966  at the  MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by  Joseph Weizenbaum . It was amazingly successful. Patients were convinced they were talking to a real person. And that was 60 years ago.

Biggest Existential Threats . Every day our leaders warn us, scare us, and threaten us about existential threats. These hint at caution: “Do something now or we will cease to exist.”  What are they? For politicians: anything that will scare you into voting for them. For scientists: anything they believe may be risky. For religions: anything disabusing the scriptures. For the people: anything they believe to be dangerous in at the moment. There is much theory involved, projections into many decades ahead, life-style changes, political expediency, and more. Politicians love these things as they generate huge campaign war chests. Here’s the shortlist. Climate change – includes global warming, changing animal habitats, enlarged deserts, increased carbon dioxide, eventual degradation of livable area, an increase of disease, rising temperatures, arctic melting, etc. Recall, in the 70s, it was all about global cooling. Pandemics – usually highly contagious diseases spread by crowding and/or

Riddle . Your object of interest looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, but is not a duck.   What is it?   Answer. It could be a pseudo-duck .   This is the principle behind most of our pseudos, e.g. pseudoscience, pseudo-psychology, pseudo-religion, and all. It's like all pass the vision and hearing tests but not the smell test. How many pseudo-ducks live inside your world? Next riddle . What if it looks like a human, walks like a human, talks like a human, but is not a human. What is it? A pseudo-human? Yes? No? Maybe it's AI, artificial intelligence. AI will trick us into believing humans are on-site and in charge but aren't – if it doesn’t already.  Reality is morphing into pseudo-reality - fast.

Today, we are discussing all those cameras being placed all over our cities.   Officials tell us it's for our protection.   Citizens are worried. Movements are afoot to reduce this camera presence.   Is it justified?   Remember, its not just the picture, it what comes with it. Pictures plus a thousand words?   Artificial Intelligence (AI) can put together your picture with all your personal data. Subversives should be nervous.   So should we all. Dossiers for all. In the West we need to trust our government to restrain its natural instincts to use any information they have to stay in power.   The comes to ethics, and ethics is rapidly becoming a theoretical subject, a historical artifact, a quaint quality. Deprecated at last review.     I don’t care what your politics.   Can you say with certainty your party would not use this information to track political opponents in looking for damaging information?   Like the old song, “Simply Irresistible.” Want more?   Enter the h

A story of the future, in four chapters Chapter 1 . It seems that Artificial Intelligence (AI), with amazing data analysis capacities and algorithms, is already making corporate decisions.  Certainly true for Wall Street with algorithmic trading, self-driving cars, algorithmic medical diagnosis.   Great, I think.   Chapter 2 . But then competitors will also use AI to determine what decisions will be made to make counter decisions. Chapter 3 . Such procedures can regress indefinitely and well beyond the reach of human understanding. Not so great, I think! Chapter 4 . Already, algorithms are adaptive, essentially rewriting themselves. Algorithms will be voted seats on the Board of Directors. Or else! By 2023, we will have the first algorithmic corporate CIO*. By 2025, the first COO. By 2030, the first CEO. End of Story. *Chief Information Officer