The Great A.I. Awakening

The simplest description of a neural network is that it’s a machine that makes classifications or predictions based on its ability to discover patterns in data. With one layer, you could find only simple patterns; with more than one, you could look for patterns of patterns.


Each neuron is connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, which means that the number of synapses is between 100 trillion and 1,000 trillion.


It means they have a fundamentally different view of the mind. Unlike Searle, they don’t assume that “consciousness” is some special, numinously glowing mental attribute — what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called the “ghost in the machine.” They just believe instead that the complex assortment of skills we call “consciousness” has randomly emerged from the coordinated activity of many different simple mechanisms. The implication is that our facility with what we consider the higher registers of thought are no different in kind from what we’re tempted to perceive as the lower registers. Logical reasoning, on this account, is seen as a lucky adaptation; so is the ability to throw and catch a ball. Artificial intelligence is not about building a mind; it’s about the improvement of tools to solve problems.


Medical diagnosis is one field most immediately, and perhaps unpredictably, threatened by machine learning. Radiologists are extensively trained and extremely well paid, and we think of their skill as one of professional insight — the highest register of thought. In the past year alone, researchers have shown not only that neural networks can find tumors in medical images much earlier than their human counterparts but also that machines can even make such diagnoses from the texts of pathology reports. What radiologists do turns out to be something much closer to predictive pattern-matching than logical analysis. They’re not telling you what caused the cancer; they’re just telling you it’s there.


Once you’ve built a robust pattern-matching apparatus for one purpose, it can be tweaked in the service of others. One Translate engineer took a network he put together to judge artwork and used it to drive an autonomous radio-controlled car. A network built to recognize a cat can be turned around and trained on CT scans — and on infinitely more examples than even the best doctor could ever review. A neural network built to translate could work through millions of pages of documents of legal discovery in the tiniest fraction of the time it would take the most expensively credentialed lawyer. The kinds of jobs taken by automatons will no longer be just repetitive tasks that were once — unfairly, it ought to be emphasized — associated with the supposed lower intelligence of the uneducated classes. We’re not only talking about three and a half million truck drivers who may soon lack careers. We’re talking about inventory managers, economists, financial advisers, real estate agents. What Brain did over nine months is just one example of how quickly a small group at a large company can automate a task nobody ever would have associated with machines.


http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html

A Chicago Christmas

the ground covered in white,  glistening
the sky above falling white, mistening
no horizons, just hushed, stifling morning white, penetrating

white peace below, above, all around, everywhere
finally a refuge, Christmas Day

7 fatal shots
one dead then another and another
two standing on the porch, a Christmas party
another with bullets to the head, the back, the legs
pool of blood upon stairs of Labor of Love Apostolic Church,
orange gloves, casings leading to the altar of Love.
and another sitting in a car, in a park, drive by shot
and another found dead in Morgan Park, 24, not 25
laying in the snow, decorating white in his red, dead

the white ground covered in red, glistening
the sky above, grey, dark, deafening
no horizons, just hushed stifling mourning grey, deathening

cold, wet, damp below, above, all around, everywhere
no refuge, not even Christmas Day.

A Christmas Child

somewhere in a land far from her parents home a child is born to a mother accompanied by a man, who is not her father but a close family relative who is taking the child and her mom to a far away land in hope that the child may live in a land where the family might worship God in peace. Her family are strangers in this land and are not well received. The are mistrusted and despised. They are seen as desperate and different and a blight upon the land, a curse to be rejected. The child is born in a tent in a field on a cold rainy day and the only visitors are fellow journeyers who wash the child and give her to her mother's bosom. They share with her and her family what little food they have and offer swaddling clothes to wrap the child in. Her mother looks into the child's face and fears for her child and her future while at the same time feeling the love and admiration of a mother for a child. She sees in her child a gift from a God who seemingly has abandoned her and her people while at the same time accompanying them in their struggles and in their hearts and encouraging them to pray and to love. Her mother sees in this child a hope for the future, a gift for all people and she is gratified that her child has arrived this day safe and healthy. She and her relatives and friends give thanks for the birth of the child and rejoice with all the angels for the gift of this life and pray that they might find a way to be welcomed and given an opportunity to love and to pray again as they had in the days of old in the land from where they have journeyed.

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".

It is the resistance to the pain that is causing the suffering.

If you can successfully work with physical pain, then you are more likely to be able to work with mental pain.

Whether we like it or not, we need to understand and be able to handle suffering to some extent, especially mental suffering, notwithstanding our inclination to acknowledge the fact of suffering or not.

Buddhist teachings stress that life is uncertain, but death is certain; life is precarious but death is sure. Life has death as its goal. There is birth, disease, suffering, old age, and eventually, death. These are all aspects of the process of existence.

Insight Meditation

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.

If science seeks total, objective, and abstract knowledge, then it is ignoring its own blind spots, irrelevancies, and biases. But if one can situate one’s knowledge as originating from a particular standpoint (I’m white, female, overeducated, middle-class, etc.) then one can acknowledge one’spartial knowledge of what there is to know… and my partial knowledge is relevant and interesting but only part of a bigger picture.

Vision is useful, she says, if we understand it as seeing from a body in a particular place. 

The solution, then, might mean acknowledging that no single eye (naked or not) can claim true objectivity – objectivity can only be approached by conversations among multiple subjective standpoints.

all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, the eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.”