First Blog

  Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? I truly like the study of consciousness, though it is safe to say no one really knows what it is. Some philosophers has avoided the problem by claiming consciousness simply doesn’t exist. It's the ultimate escape clause. However, the "therefore, it does not exist" argument also applies to "truth", "God", and even "reality" all quite beyond a consensus description for at least three millennia. For each issue or problem defying description or understanding, simply escape the problem by claiming it doesn’t exist. Problem solved or problem avoided? Alternately, as Daniel Dennett explains consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. However, he goes on to say that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist [1] . Oh, well. Getting back to consciousness, most of us have view...

  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 t...

  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.

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.

FUTURE SPEAK “I can write but I can’t read.” Who could ever say that?   In fact, much of what you read today is generated by such entities.     Huh? You need a couple of active, commercially available products in wide application today.   Both are a part of NLP – Natural Language Processing.   The first is NLG – Natural Language Generation.   This is an outflow from AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can generate text from data (with templates and bias if you want). It is almost undetectable as machine generated, makes sense, and can be generated at the rate of thousands of pages per second.   It is used by news organizations, corporations, Investment firms, accounting firms, and the like.   It can be and probably is used by political parties to generate manifold texts for wide distribution.   Input is data, headline texts, and articles. It is nearly grammatically perfect. NLU – Natural Language Understanding.   Also, it...

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, Pandemics, Artificial Intelligence, Drones, War, and Black Swans. 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 meltin...

If you are over 50, you are probably among the last people on earth where you will complete your life in a traditional way.  Namely,... You were born, grew up, matured, reproduced, grow old and then pass away, without the assistance or hinderance of massive data about you, nor excessive intrusion into your life.  If you’re younger, you’ve been fully tracked.  By the time you retire, there will be so much information about you online and for sale, that just about anyone with a couple of bucks can purchase your life story in data.  AI (Artificial Intelligence) will project accurately your future medical problems as you age. Your financial condition will be known even sooner. Your credit history will cover decades. All your jobs and performance ratings will be available. Your complete family and their records will be correlated as well into the giant record, which will be you.   In future, you may see the courts order an AI monitor to assist with your financ...

The Dark Side of Big Data, IV – Deadly Algorithms It is important to look in advance of the information, to establish what is possible before the possibility becomes reality. Every truth discovered begins as a possibility. The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data is that it takes the human out of the decision process.   The promised truth of AI (the algorithms) in tandem with big data is better analysis, faster execution of decisions, safer driving, correct diagnoses, or whatever lies on the table.   What could be bad about that? Everyone has heard of algorithmic data analysis with built-in triggers for action.   The most prominent example is with the stock market.   Algorithms are so entrenched within the buy-sell patterns, many brokerage firms are now controlled by news reports and financial input for potential transactions. Oil problems in the Middle East signals sell, and baby, they sell.   China trade deal is near signals buy, and ...

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

Many robots, at the industrial, home, and combat levels now exist.   They are becoming more powerful almost at a Moore’s law rate of doubling capacity every 18 months.   For decades now, many movies have depicted robots at more human levels.   Many of these films and let’s say “philosophers of robotics” suggest robots exceeding human capacity in almost every way.   One recent movie, “The Machine”, illustrates a robot vastly more powerful that humans, intellectually and emotionally, but also more human that humans.   They can pass the Turing test (Imitation game*) easily.   Ray Kurzweil** suggests that computer intellectual capacity will exceed humans by 2050,   easily passing the Turning test, and that by 2099 clear distinctions between humans and machines will no longer exist.   This is a tall order, if only considering the aspects of problems solving.***     Steven Hawking**** suggests that robots may be the next evolutionary ...