Interview with Machine Learning in Science MSc Student: Zhuang Zhou Feng

[@MrGaborseres]

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[@user-lv5bt3nt3r]

A machine cannot "learn". Anymore than a clock "knows" what the time is (or even what time is). This field of education could do with a big dose of education in philosophy because these guys may know how to develop the technology but they are constantly misusing language and warping it into incorrect meanings that could have severe consequences down the track. Its disturbing how widespread this misuse of language is in relation to this field of endeavour. The way people use language shapes how they think, and theres a lot of misuse of language going on in the field of machine "learning" and "artifical intelligence". Im not one of those people who think "AI" (another horrifying erroneous use of language) will eventually zap us all, but I do know that these guys really know not what they do.

[@kablamo9999]

Machine learning is definitely a real area of research within the larger area of AI.

[@user-lv5bt3nt3r]

@ of course it is. But thats not the issue. A university student writes essays how they write them because the knowledge is in their heads and the writing part is putting that knowledge - that understanding - on paper, so an examiner can judge how much they understand. The same logic applies to examinations. The purpose of that is to engender sufficient understanding into the student so that they can use that understanding as the base to apply creativity - human creativity - to create new views, new ideas. Who knows, through vague connections maybe they will invent something entirely new and different. A machine - a computer - cannot do that. It writes essays not based on its understanding but by reviewing hundreds, thousands, millions, of similar PAST essays and then, through a series of assessments of probability, cobbling together words that ape the student’s essay. But the machine doesnt understand what it wrote. Anymore than a clock understands what time it is, or even what time is. In other words, thats not ‘intelligence’ - artificial or otherwise. No-one says ‘my clock is intelligent, it knows what time it is’. Because its a machine. Worse, a machine - a computer - relies solely on what is in its memory storage. If i give it 5 essays as its database to write a similar essay, it will only ape whats in those 5 essays, same with 100, 1,000, 1,000,000 essays for a large language model to go nuts with. Now, youre going to say ‘same with humans; they cant write about what they dont know about’. And thats true. But human intelligence is built into a system of curiosity, experience, and - to put it simply - wishful thinking. A human can think ‘what if?’ And draw tenuous links that can be explored to advance a field, that a computer just will never be capable of. A computer’s ‘thought’ process will always be limited by a rule that computer programmers have always known about - ‘sh.t in, sh.t out’. A computer cant think about whats outside its experience. And a computer cant experience what humans experience. It cant smell flowers, it doesnt know the scent of a woman, or the smell of a new born baby. Because its not human. To call a machine’s processing of information, no matter how powerful that processing is, ‘intelligence’ both misstates what is actually happening - which is deeply unscientific - and misuses language to degrade the true nature of intelligence. Thats both dangerous and, frankly, wrong, because by understating the value and superiority of human intelligence it suggests that machines are on a par to us and we should subordinate ourselves to machine ‘intelligence’. That completely reverses the true position. Which is that computers are tools, and they will never be anything more than tools. They cannot be allowed to rule us, even if fools like Zuckerberg and Musk think otherwise. And by the way, imperial chinese history gives us a dire example of what happens when the human mind and spirit operates like a computer. With its emphasis on ancestor worship and confucianism, imperial china created an entire society in which only that which was already known to the ancestors was worthy of veneration. Much like how a computer can only derive ideas from pre-supplied data. The result, for China, was thousands of years of crippled curiosity and the avoidance of all things new - no real scientific advances, no social advances, no major development, and a waste of human intelligence on a gargantuan scale. Thats what life under ‘artificial intelligence’ would be like. Because computers are not people. It would be like a rehash of marvel movies ad infinitum - which the machines, and the people who worship the machines, are already delivering. And, if you are old enough to remember the time before the machines, you know its not an improvement.