AI

 

Dawn (Go Away)

Think (think)
What a big man he'll be
Think
Of the places you'll see
Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me
Dawn go away

Thinking is intelligence, not inference

The topic du jour seems to be AI, Artificial Intelligence. This is, IMHO, an oxymoron. It really should be Artificial Inference. Computers (the Artificial part) are building inferences based on the data that they examine. However inferences are NOT always intelligent. Before Copernicus, the inference was that the sun moved around the earth. Before modern geology, the inference was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. Before Michelson, the inference was that light moved though a luminiferous aether that permeated empty space. Before Einstein’s Theory of relativity, it was inferred that there was an absolute frame of reference.

The best that can be hoped from computers is that they will make inferences, discover a pattern in the data. It will be up to some one else to use intelligence to say what that pattern means.

Before you acknowledge that there is a pattern, make sure that you know what data has been examined. The Literary Digest famously predicted that Alf Landon would defeat Roosevelt in the Presidential election of 1936 because they had only polled their readers. If the data that AI is using is not inclusive, any patterns from that data will reflect its exclusions. You can’t make any inferences from data that you don’t have.