I don't know, inference from data is literally how all decisions are fundamentally made. Why wouldn't it be possible to create models that learn this particular pattern?
Learning, as in what we do, is not learning associations in datasets.
It is learning "associations" between: our body state and the world as we act. It's a sort of: (action, world, body, sensation, prior conceptualisation, ...) association. (Even then, our bodies grow and this is really not a formal process.)
This is, at least, what is necessary to understand what words mean. Words are just tools that we use to coordinate with each other in a shared (physical) world. You really have to be here, with us, to understand them. Words mean what we do with them.
Meaning has a "useful side-effect". It turns out when we are using words their sequencing reveals, on average, some commonalities in their use. Eg., when asking "Can you pass me the salt?" I may go on to ask, "and now the pepper". And thus there is a statistical association between the terms "salt" and "pepper".
But a machine processing only those associations is completely unaware there is anything "salt" to pass, or even that there are objects in the world, or people, or anything. Really, the machine has no connection between its interior and the world, the very connection we have when we use words.
When a machine generates the text "pass me the salt" it doesnt mean it. It cannot. There is no salt it's talking about. It doesnt even know what salt is.
A machine used to make decisions concerning people, unaware of what a person even is, produces new unethical forms of action. Not merely just "being racist because the data is".
This is a big part of why I’m bearish on things like fully autonomous self-driving cars until general AI is achieved. Driving is fundamentally a social activity that you participate in with other humans, at least until we built out nation-wide autonomous-only lanes that only allow (through a gate or barrier) autonomous vehicles with self-driving engaged in a way that normal vehicles can’t “sneak in”…I’m not holding my breath. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime (30s), maybe not.
I think we're drifting into charlatanism, fraud and pseudoscience.
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[1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere
There is a new secular religion underneath this.
"Uploading consciousness", "Aren't we all just data systems?", "We've built a neural network with as many (meaningless) neurones as the brain!"
It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster.
Thankfully here, I think, the religion has predictions. It predicts a self-driving car, a "fourth industrial revolution", and so on. When these fail to materialise, some sanity will return.
(Of course they have already failed, the question is when in the next 5-10yrs people will realise.)
Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point!
I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism - and history "rhymed" 100 years later - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050842091057... and I would argue that it "rhymes" once again today with Musk following in Ford's footsteps, although with perhaps less intent than Ford
Powerful and concise, thank you.