Arrgh! Henry Kissinger talking about expert systems.

Arrgh, Henry Kissinger talking about expert systems, nothing could trigger me faster. Thank you Bernard, here I go:

Firstly: Chess and go are examples of how well cognitive systems perform is closed environments, where all the rules are known and the goal perfectly clear. Expert systems are just algorithms designed to optimise the win conditions and nothing more, it is indeed humans who set this win conditions, and they (as with all engineering projects) need to choose the speed at which they develop. Self driving cars have been in development since 1995. Companies that have pushed too hard too fast (Tesla, Uber) have seen what often happens to such efforts, and more cautious companies (Google) are developing solutions that are much more robust.

Now to the three areas of concern raised by Henry:

1 - Unintended results, Yes! science love unintended results as it can point the way to new paths of understanding, but this is how we as humans can challenge our assumptions. We set the win conditions and are then amazed when the computer finds an original new path too them. This is the very nature of science. It works better than just bombing Laos.

3 - Expert systems cannot explain the rationale, I am very sceptical about this, as again it is the programmer who set (and can audit) the win conditions. The solutions may seem strange, but they will always be defined by clear criteria, which can be interrogated. If you want to look for weird win conditions, Henry was the master of that in his foreign policy.

2 - AI may change human thought patterns and goals. The more I thought about this the more I realised that HK had a point, albeit one that is regularly made. Facebook and Google are platforms using cognitive systems to sell clicks of advertisements (or lie about clicks and then sell them). This has lead to everyone getting to live in their little echo chamber and struggling to engage with alternate points of view. 

So the real concern is how to we broaden the human mind to consider multiple perspectives and care about the results of our actions. I struggle to see how a national vision on A.I. will help us, although a bit more philosophy in our schools and universities might be a good step. Seems a shame Kissinger didn't raise that.

Jordan Peterson, winning isn't everything.

I am assuming that readers of this have seen the Jordan Peterson - Cathy Newman interview which has catapulted Mr. Peterson to fame (perfect book launch!). It is compelling viewing, and has been viewed a bit under six million times in the last week. The Australian news paper has also had a series of articles about Peterson and responses to the interview. If you have not seen the interview please take a look:

There is no debate that Ms. Newman got owned, there has been a lot of analysis of the interview, but the main point is that Ms. Newman was unprepared for what she was getting into, a debate with a empirical clinical psychologist.

As a result of this I started to watch some of Mr. Peterson's videos on YouTube, and discovered that all of his lectures are available, and he is a fantastic thinker, and very interesting chap. I particularly enjoyed his viewpoint on atheism)

However the point I wanted to try to capture in this article is that I did think Mr. Peterson made two errors (and possibly only two) and that they are worth noting as they speak to errors that can be made by those people who believe they are winning any argument.

Firstly, beginning at 21:44 Ms. Newman is forced to carefully reconsider her beliefs about free speech, it is the most amazing moment of the interview, Mr. Peterson has made his argument so compellingly, that she is forced to reconsider her beliefs and re-examine her intellectual rigour live!

Mr. Peterson makes his first and simplest mistake then; he says "Ha! gotcha!" acknowledging that Ms. Newman has been playing gotcha politics all interview and yet he has created the moment.

Ms. Newman is doing a very brave thing here, she is genuinely thinking, and about to come up with a reasonable point, and doing it all on live TV (something Peterson has done all interview), and at that point the best thing to do is to wait for your opponent to develop their argument, not to embarrass them. Mr. Peterson has held the upper hand in the interview the entire time, and that was the only point where I felt he lost it.

Finally, when Ms. Newman does develop her augment further, Mr. Peterson says something very interesting, namely that he would address his students by transgender pronouns if asked personally to do so. This is seemingly at odds to his previous position established on air that he would refuse to do so (at 0:48):

Mr. Peterson denies changing his position, and yet it seems to me that he has made a change here, and possibly just to ensure that Ms. Newman has nowhere to run in the interview.

So while I have developed a great interest in Mr. Peterson's work, my lessons from the interview come mainly from what I see as his mistakes...