Artificial intelligence

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The promise of artificial intelligence is that it will make decisions faster.  But what happens if it makes bad decisions faster?  We are trying to replicate human skills that have evolved for millions of years, and yet we cannot predict accurately what decisions AI will come up with.  Just say AI progresses to a point where it is smarter than human beings.  Where will that leave us ?  Answer  – as virtual slaves to machines.

My own reaction to this is to invoke Epicurean moderation.  There are clearly activities for which artificial intelligence can be a benefit to the world – and others where it is yet another challenge to peace of mind.

And yet…..and yet…… I have been sitting here, having invoked moderation, trying to think what applications of AI I could actually support and find useful. But I don’t want an AI-equipped machine to cook for me, drive for me,  buy tickets to a concert for me, or book foreign holidays, either.  As you get older you need use your brain and what memory you have left. Use-it-or-lose-it.  Even at its most benign a fast- thinking machine potentially removes the need to think for yourself. So  I will give AI a pass, (that is if I have an, unlikely, say in the matter).

Oh, just remembered (without AI):  happy Thanksgiving!

A literary judgment

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to The Guardian:

Notice seen recently in the window of the bookshop in Fowey, Cornwall: “The Post-Apocalyptic Fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs.”

Harry Cavill, Camberley, Surrey 

 

And an ancient complaint from an Epicurean:

At the end of the 4th Century A.D Ammianus complained that the Roman Empire had lost its cultural moorings and had descended into a state of triviality, where scholarship was no longer respected and fewer and fewer people read anything at all.  Sound familiar?

What is intelligence?

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Far from being an indefinable concept, a single measure of intelligence underpins our problem-solving, musicality and even creativity and emotional skills

When researchers talk about intelligence, they are referring to a specific set of skills that includes the abilities to reason, learn, plan and solve problems. The interesting thing is that people who are good at one of them tend to be good at all of them. These skills seem to reflect a broad mental capability, which has been dubbed general intelligence or g.

That’s not to say people don’t specialise in different areas. Some will be particularly good at solving mathematical problems, others will have particularly strong verbal or spatial abilities, and so on. When it comes to intelligence tests, although these specific skills account for about half of the variation between people’s performance, the other half is down to g. “If you took a sample of 1000 people and gave them all IQ tests, the people who do better on the vocabulary test will also do better, on average, on the reaction speed test, and so on,” says Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Our thinking on human intellect is clouded with misinformation. But the latest science of intelligence is surprisingly enlightening.  This seems to fly in the face of old ideas. In the early 1980s, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner argued for the existence of multiple intelligences, including “bodily-kinaesthetic”, “logical-mathematical” and “musical”. However, most researchers now believe these categories reflect different blends of abilities, skills and personality traits, not all of which are related to cognitive ability. Likewise, recent research indicates that so-called emotional intelligence – the ability to regulate one’s emotions and relate to other people – is simply a mixture of general intelligence and personality.

Even creativity is related to g. There is a linear correlation up to an IQ of about 120 – classified as above average intelligence – although the link breaks down after that. “The idea that you can be creative without being intelligent is a myth: it takes a certain level of intelligence to acquire raw data to be creative with,” says neuropsychologist Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico.

So, what is the biological basis of g? One suggestion is that it reflects “mental energy”: the brains of people with high IQs seem to use less energy when performing mental tasks, and their neurons conduct signals faster. Possibly then, clever brains are more efficient. Another idea is that smart people have greater working memories, so can hold onto and process more information at any given moment. For now, the g-factor has a lot in common with the X factor: we don’t know precisely why it makes someone stand out, just that it does.
(Linda Geddes, New Scientist 22 July 2018)

An Epicurean enjoys the company and friendship of intelligent people, but also respects the conversation and views of those who haven’t been so amply blessed.  Some call it “being a lady or a gentleman”.

The multitasking myth

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Is the idea that women are better multitaskers than men a convenient myth, to help men avoid the domestic burden? That is the implication of a new study by scientists at Aachen University in Germany, which found that the two sexes are equally good – or rather equally bad – at performing different tasks at the same time. For the study, 48 men and 48 women took part in a computer-based challenge that required them to identify letters as either consonants or vowels, and numbers as either odd or even, as they flashed up on a screen. In the first part of the experiment, the participants were presented with the letters and numbers separately. In the second, they were asked to categorise them at the same time, or to switch rapidly between the two – mimicking the kind of mental shifts involved in multitasking in other settings. While both sexes were equally adept at the first part, they found the second stage equally challenging – suggesting, says the team in PLOS One, that “there are no substantial gender differences in multitasking performance”.  (The Week, 31 Aug 2019)

What  I deduce from this is that it reinforces the whole idea of gender equality, and that individually people might prove better or worse than others, but overall there is little or no overall difference between women and men when it comes to the day-to- day tasks of life.  Hooray!

But now comes the rub.  Men and women have to behave as equals.  There seems to be among  a (hopefully small) number of women that the “tables have turned”, and that they can with impunity express their ideas and opinions at length without given a male companion an opportunity for discussion, only because of their gender, a form of bullying. Yes, for centuries men have also held forth, treating women as “the other”, not worth attending to. And many still do, regrettably.  That Is bullying, too, and is also bad manners.

Men and women have to respect each other, be kind and considerate, and espouse equality, nothing more or nor less.  We really have to stop all this nonsense.  It is no excuse to say, “this is what I learned while growing up”.  They imbibed the wrong message.

 

Is this Epicurean?

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Heartlessness is now official US policy

The Trump administration is deporting thousands of legal immigrants to countries “they barely know”. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority (ICE) can find any refugee “deportable” if they’ve a crime on their record – even selling marijuana – and that covers about 120,000 immigrants who came here as refugees.

So now deportations to places like Somalia, Cambodia and Eritrea are soaring, as people who’ve spent decades in the US are sent to countries blighted by crime and political repression. In March, a deportee died in a restaurant bombing in Mogadishu. An Eritrean deportee was so distraught he killed himself en route to his native country.

Then there’s the case of Jimmy Aldaoud, a 41-year-old Michigan man recently deported to Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi Christian refugees who brought him to the US as a baby, he was severely mentally ill and often homeless. This led to the multiple arrests used as the justification for deporting him. Yet he’d never been to Iraq, “had no language skills, no place to live and no family connections”. He died, probably from poorly-controlled diabetes, a few months later. Unless ICE changes the rules, there will be many more Jimmy Aldaouds.  (Chris Gelardi, Slate (New York), and The Week 31 August 2019).

It is hard to believe that the “base” really supports this cruel treatment towards people who never lived before in the country they are deported to.  This is not a political issue; it is an issue of human kindness and respect for others.

I am an immigrant myself, albeit I did it correctly, to my utter frustration and disbelief (I will not bore you with the bureaucratic hassles).  Thus, although I consider myself a humanitarian, I think the laws should be obeyed and no one should sneak into any country without permission, otherwise I might have sneaked in myself.

But the supporters of this policy of expelling people to countries they have never lived in and whose language they barely, if at all, speak,  is quite the opposite of humane and Christian.  How can one characterize opposing  abortion, but supporting expulsion?