Automatic

 

If I Only Had A Brain

I would not be just a nothin'
My head all full of stuffin'
My heart all full of pain.
I would dance and be merry,
Life would be a ding-a-derry,
If I only had a brain.

USING a brain beats HAVING a brain.

With all of the brouhaha about Artificial Intelligence, too often it is forgotten that this is just using a computer to execute a program. Unless the computer, the input data, and the formula in the program is correct, being able to execute it quickly or effortlessly, is NOT necessarily intelligent. It is NOT using the brain that you already have.

Grace Hopper, of the “It's Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than It Is To Get Permission” fame, recorded the first computer bug in 1947. The error was a hardware failure caused by a moth in the computer.

On Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the stock market plunged (the S&P 500 dropped nearly 10% in a single trading day) as computerized trading programs caused a market crash that could NOT be tracked to any other fundamental problems.

In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed upon entering Mars' orbit at the wrong angle because the navigation team had entered calculations in the Imperial system (feet and pounds) and the program expected data in the metric system (meters and grams).

In 1999, global panic resulted when it was realized that the storage of only the last two numbers of a year,  e.g. 99 instead of 1999, might result in numerous computer errors.

In 2012, the Gangnam Style video broke YouTube because the maximum views allowed was stored as a 32-bit integer, which has a maximum of 2,147,483,647, and the number of views exceeded this.

In computer science, there is a phrase, GIGO, which means Garbage In, Garbage Out. This is true if the garbage is a hardware failure, an error in the input data, or a flaw in the program code. The important thing is to get the correct answer. Getting an answer quickly and cheaply, but getting the wrong answer is NOT using your brain.

Making something automatic when you are using the wrong formula in the code, is only getting to the wrong answer faster and more easily. The US Congress made the reapportionment of House seats after the decennial census automatic and an imbalance, e.g. between California and Wyoming seats per voter, is the consequence. John Taylor wanted to make the Federal Reserve Bank’s prime interest rate automatic but thankfully Congress did not make this mandatory. To err is human. But if you make an error, you are supposed to learn from that error, not replicate your mistake automatically.