There are two realities when it comes toartificial intelligence.
In one, the futures so bright you should probably put on welding goggles just to glance at it.
AI is a backbone technology thats just as necessary for global human operations as electricity and the internet.
But in the other reality, winter is coming.
An AI winter, is a period in which nothing can grow.
That means nobodys hiring, nobodys acquiring, and nobodys funding.
But this impending barren season is special, it wont affect the entire industry.
In fact, most of the experts wont even notice it.
Startups with a clear, useful purpose will be fine typical market issues notwithstanding.
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The part that cannot be stressed enough is that this particular scam is being perpetuated throughout academia.
It doesnt matter if youre planning to attend a community college or Stanford, black box alchemy is everywhere.
This is, quite literally, the hardest part.
Humans will wreck the AI at this task 100 out of 100 times.
Were really good at telling cats from dogs.
And you cant pick a task thats too complicated.
The number of humans that could win at that game is too small to matter.
Once youve done that, the rest is easy.
Gaydar
My favorite example of black box alchemy isthe Stanford Gaydar paper.
Its a masterpiece in bullshit AI.
Researchers trained a rudimentary computer vision system on a database of human faces.
The faces were labeled with self-reported tags indicating whether the individual pictured identified as gay or straight.
Over time, they were able to reach superhuman levels of accuracy.
Heres the truth: no human can tell if another human is gay.
Sometimes we might guess right, other times we might guess wrong.
Science requires observation and measurement.
If theres nothing to observe or measure, we cannot do science.
Gayness is not a ground truth.
Theres no scientific measurement for gayness.
Can you be a gay virgin?
Can you have a queer experience and remain straight?
How many gay thoughts does it take to qualify you as gay, and who gets to decide that?
Nobody can determine whether someone else is gay.
There is no scientific test for gay.
And thats both good and bad.
