Real meaning of AI

I recently attend a conference of AI and Sustainability and came away with a different perspective. I have been doing this investigating for some time at other ‘AI‘ discussions and have resolved an understanding that what is being described as AI, as in Artificial intelligence, is in reality, only an example of the second stage of industrialist Revolution, the electronic analysis of (big) data to control manual (automated) machines.

The only element of the current AI (buzz) business that could be considered intelligent, is the intake, and analysis of data as a front end user interface to existing machine technology. Fundamentally the ‘Intelligence’ is only a programmed response to data changes which adapts limited machines, to adjusting to changes in the data, that it is designed to digest.

There is real AI, real sentience research going on, but it is years away from real applications. What the public has been seeing in Alexa, SIRI, Google Assistant, MyCroft and Open Assistant is just programmed ‘Simulated Intelligent‘ (SI) not real cognitive intelligence.

In the more extensive examples of ‘AI‘ or SI the ‘intelligence’ is just more complex, and adapts to more complex data sets than a simpler one. A device that converses with you is doing more analysis, of voice patterns, language syntax, and context. It does NOT understand what you are saying, it operates only within the limited, but expandable, programmed responses. So if a self driving car kills someone, it’s not the fault of the AI/SI it is the programmers fault for bad programming.

This whole interpretation of SI rather than AI will make for a great deal of Legal entanglements that will last for years. And meanwhile the development of real AI will develop to the point that when (I believe in when) there is a real AI, a sentient, cognitive Intelligence we will have to revisit the entire meaning of being alive.

And maybe then, we can worry about people losing their jobs due to AI.

Slavery returns to U.S.

Donald Trump, the future President of the United States has just made slaves of over 2 million ‘Illegal’ Aliens. A Peoples that now are too afraid of deportation to speak up, or to speak out about low wages, bad treatment, and substandard living conditions. They are now slaves of the United States of America.

Welcome to the ‘Good old Daysof the Confederacy

The Peasants of the U.S.

In a recent trip to the U.S. to visit the relatives, my wife tried to do shopping in one of the big malls and while watching her and the selections presented by the various stores I came to the conclusion that Americans are, or are being made into Peasants. I could not tell any difference in the selection of drab, shapeless sackcloth being presented by a various Macy’s, Dillard’s Nordstrom’s, J.C. Penny’s you name it, they were all the same. This was extending into the people wandering around the Mall, shapeless clothing. Tights on legs and bags on top. When the sharpest dressers were in Jeans and sneakers, that was saying a lot.

Even in the restaurants, guys in T-Shirts, and women in baggy sacks. Peasants everywhere.

peasants_thenThen…

peasants_nowNow!

Walking on water

Some time ago a visitor to my site commented that the photo I used as a header was ‘Horses walking on Water’ and I really never took notice, but yes, they do look that way.

cropped-B_header

But this photo taken with a very cheap digital camera just didn’t bring out the picture well enough to see the shallow beach on which the water was covering, and my clipping of the photo has eliminated the shoreline. The beach, and the inlet are located to the north in Donegal Ireland. A lovely place to visit, if you can avoid the frequent rain. Beyond that further hill, and 1000 miles of ocean, is Greenland.

Learning Computers and Computing

I have been doing research into the nature of computers and I’ve been participating with with the phenomena know as Coderdojo. As part of my research I’ve been relearning Assembly language on several different architectures, and I’ve been experimenting with such things a the ELF Membership Card which I soldered myself and is currently running in front of me, along with a Arduino Uno. These both represent small microprocessor, very like the ones I personally started out on.

My first computer was an Apple II+ with a Motorola 6502 processor. But in any case, this act of relearning what a computer really is has made me aware of the lack of any real education ‘tools’ like I had. The sensation that is the Raspberry-Pi is fast becoming the CPU-du-jour of the developers, and as such may develop into a great educational tool. But, and there is always a but, it doesn’t stand on it’s own.

The group who developed the Pi have themselves noted that this is a developmental prototype, and that it needs to be distilled into a real educational product. It first need a keyboard, mouse, display a SD-Memory card and a power supply, to even turn it on. To make it useful as a net-workable it also needs a connection to hardwired Ethernet. It needs to have software preloaded onto the SD-Memory to boot properly. These are Geek requirements, anyone who can make this work, ALREADY has working knowledge and equipment, call it infrastructure, to make this work. What is missing in this is a standalone environment that is self contained and independent of both other systems, and other foreknowledge of computing.

My Apple II came with a keyboard, memory, built-in BASIC programing language, and displayed it’s output into a common Television, and recorded and loaded programs from a simple cassette player. All these elements were basic, everyday items in my household, and it would plug into the mains power directly, and display on a TV. It started up using Applesoft BASIC language and displayed on the screen everything I typed.

The Rasberry-Pi now needs this type of infrastructure. And while on this subject, and not to stir a pot, comes a language issue. The apple I learned on came with BASIC and in fact I still have a fondness for BASIC. The current arguments in the ‘Programming Education’ discussions are that a language like BASIC teaches BAD programming practice. Be in old, I had to remember the motivations of BASIC and was more enlightened to connect this with my reeducation about Assembly language. That was the first reason for BASIC! BASIC is and was engineered to, more or less, follow the structure of the instruction set of the CPU itself. Where language snobs see bad ‘GOTO’s in BASIC, I see machine language Conditional and unconditional ‘Branch’ instructions. Where I see a BASIC with line numbers (not all BASICs have them) I see ‘Linear’ machine instructions.

One element of the Raspberry-Pi that also misses the mark, is the nature of ‘abstraction’ while I admire the Python of the Pi, and the ‘C’ like language of the Arduino, what is missing is the distance between the learner programmer and the actual machine. It may even be a serious problem as the machine begins to look like magic, and that it can be made to do anything.

The programming of the RCA 1802 chip contained in the ELF Membership Card demonstrated what the creator of the card referred to as ‘Bare metal programing’. A simple program that I used to test the ELF with consisted of 12, 8 Bit instructions, writing (essentially) the same program for the Arduino required downloading of 998 8 Bit instructions (not including the 512 Bytes of the boot loader). To be sure there were probably a lot of libraries included in that download. Helpful, but masking the actual operations of the CPU from any real educational product. Just like that Arduino, the Raspberry-Pi will mask the CPU, and the associated hardware by a boot loader (BIOS), followed by a full, though striped to minimum, Linux kernel, and a GUI in the form of LXDE X-Windows, followed by Python language. That’s a lot of abstraction!

All these things may be irrelevant in the long term, one thing may lead to stimulation to explore the ‘Bare Metal’ hardware of the Raspberry-Pi while allowing a positive feedback with easy ‘wins’ on top of the abstraction provided. Still I believe we are missing an opportunity to produce the next generation of computer wizards. I also believe that someone needs to integrate the Rasberry-Pi into a OLPC type of device.

Apache Web Projects

Having just escaped/exited from a brief encounter with a company utilizing some of Apache’s Web Projects. I keep being struck by the feeling that I’ve seen the issues before. Over a fairly long run in the IT industry I have the feeling that Apache and it’s contributors have been busy re-inventing the wheel. The Apache Hadoop as a distributed file system designed for large data sets. Apache Solr a full text search server and indexer combined with Apache Lucene supplying the search libraries. Coordinated by Apache ZooKeeper all begins to sound like a description of your average Relational Database System (RDBMS)

All these elements being created by the Apache Foundation have been, sometime in the past, been solved by most of the Relational (Big) database vendors. All the bugs and missed steps have all been made by previous developments which only reminds me of the old saw

“Those who do not learn from the past, are destined to relive them (ie repeat the same mistakes)”

Nokia, a wholy owned subsidary of MicroSoft

The writing was on the wall when Elop (read eFlop) was forced in as CEO of Nokia. An X-MicroSofty with his head up MicroSoft’s butt.

UPDATE: In this article Stephen Elop Responds eFlop states he has been investigating the Microsoft stragedity from only the last 4 months, what a lie, that’s that what Mubarak was staying about staying in Egypt, Elop was and IS a Microsoft Talking head and the sole purpose of his forced hiring by the Board was to pursue the Microsoft plan.

Amazing Internet

Yesterday I just got a trackback from a new article on Business News, Advices, Quotes And quite a handful of link through’s from there also. The funny part, call it amazing, they were linking to blog post I wrote 18 Months ago. Hardly a current, breaking news item, but the article seem to be quite active considering the link through’s and the minor nature, in context, with what the article was on about.

The internet really doesn’t forget.

iPad Virtual Keyboard censorship

This thought has come to mind as there are many voices out there who have commented on the iPad’s virtual Keyboard‘. Many have found it hard to type on and found themselves unable to touch type on it as the very nature of touch sensitivity makes it impossible make contact with the ‘keys’. In other words, you can’t type long missives, emails or any other textual input.

What if the iPad is a form of Censorship? Making it hard to comment on the internet, create content, write Twitters/email/Blogs whatever. Because the keyboard it too hard and frustrating to enter anything other than simple search phrases. A consumer ONLY device, made to fill the passive vessels that constitutes the bulk of the internet readership? Content omnivores as Pew Research calls them, an advertising and News consuming only population.

Настолько длиной, спасибо для всего спам!

Настолько длиной, спасибо для всего спам! Кажется, что любят русские спаммеры к спам это место. Так я попытаю найти путь преградить.