Monday, September 10, 2018

I Did Warn You


When I read the latest dreck from the "Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence", all I could think was: I did warn you.

Of course, it didn't really take that much cleverness. The "Center" is a project of the Discovery Institute, a think tank so committed to dissembling about evolution that it's often been called the "Dishonesty Institute". And, as I pointed out, the folks working at the "Center" aren't exactly luminaries in the area they purport to critique.

This latest column is by Michael Egnor, a surgeon whose arrogance (as we've seen many times before) is only exceeded by his ignorance. Despite knowing nothing about computer science, Egnor tries to explain what machine learning is. The results are laughable.

Egnor starts by making an analogy between a book and a computer. He says a book "is a tool we use to store and retrieve information, analogous in that respect to a computer". But this comparison misses the single most essential feature of a computer: it doesn't just store and retrieve information, it processes it. A book made of paper typically does not; the words are the same each time you look at it.

Egnor goes on to construct an analogy where the book's binding cracks preferentially where people use it. But to be a computer you need more kinds of processing capabilities than cracked bindings. Not just any processing; there's a reason why machines like the HP-35, despite their ability to do trig functions and exponentials, were called "calculators" and not "computers". To be genuinely considered a "computer", a machine should be able to carry out basic operations such as comparisons and conditional branching. And some would say that a computer isn't a real computer until it can simulate a Turing machine. A book with a cracked binding isn't even close.

Egnor goes on to elaborate on his confusion. "The paper, the glue, and the ink are the book's hardware. The information in the book is the software." Egnor clearly doesn't understand computers! Software specifies actions to be taken by the computer, as a list of commands. But a book doesn't typically specify any actions, and if it does, those actions are not carried out by the "paper" or "glue" or "ink". If anything carries out those actions, it is the reader of the book. So the book's hardware is actually the person reading the book. Egnor's analogy is all wrong.

Egnor claims that computers "don't have minds, and only things with minds can learn". But he doesn't define what he means by "mind" or "learn", so we can't evaluate whether this is true. Most people who actually work in machine learning would dispute his claim. And Egnor contradicts himself when he claims that machine learning programs "are such that repeated use reinforces certain outcomes and suppresses other outcomes", but that nevertheless this isn't "learning". Human learning proceeds precisely by this kind of process, as we know from neurobiology.

Finally, Egnor claims that "it is man, and only man, who learns". This will be news to the thousands of researchers who study learning in animals, and have done so for decades.

When a center is started by people with a religious axe to grind, and staffed by people who know little about the area they purport to study, you're guaranteed to get results like this. Computer scientists have a term for this already: GIGO.

3 comments:

JimV said...

More and more educated people have been exposed to computers and have some idea of how they work. Egnor's apologetics and their ilk should drive a wedge deeper and deeper between religious fanatics and younger generations. At least that's what I'm seeing anecdotally, from the midst of an evangelic family. The youngsters and middle-agers watch BBC's "Planet Earth" with no qualms about the evolutionary perspective. When an old-timer objects, they shrug it off as, "Oh well, that's just grandpa."

They're not planning to give up their religion, but they don't see evolution or artificial intelligence as a threat to it, necessarily. Even the "Bible" colleges they go to have computer courses.

The more nonsense Eignor and his colleagues spout, the worse for their cause, in the long run. That's the optimistic possibility, anyway. But then, I also think Trump is causing his own downfall with his behavior. We will see how that works out. (I hope in the coming election.) (Another parallel I see between Eignor and Trump is that I wonder if they can help all of it, or if some of their behavior might be due to physical problems with their brains which they can't help--having known someone whom that happened to.)

Unknown said...

We are talking about a guy who has claimed that all murders and mass shootings are caused by Democrats

Unknown said...

”We are talking about a guy who has claimed that all murders and mass shootings are caused by Democrats.”

I was just going to say that.