λογική και τέρατα

Ο τρόμος της Σωσάννας. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn: Η Σωσάννα και οι γέροι [1647]

Η λογική που ποτέ δεν κοιμάται παράγει τέρατα.

Carlos Fuentes [Constancia, 1994]

Artificial Intelligence - the hype of our century?

Enki Bilal

... Machine learning algorithms don’t yet understand things the way humans do — with sometimes disastrous consequences. The challenge of creating humanlike intelligence in machines remains greatly underestimated. Today’s A.I. systems sorely lack the essence of human intelligence: understanding the situations we experience, being able to grasp their meaning.

...

The lack of humanlike understanding in machines is underscored by recent cracks that have appeared in the foundations of modern A.I. While today’s programs are much more impressive than the systems we had 20 or 30 years ago, a series of research studies have shown that deep-learning systems can be unreliable in decidedly unhumanlike ways.

...

Programs that “read” documents and answer questions about them can easily be fooled into giving wrong answers when short, irrelevant snippets of text are appended to the document. Similarly, programs that recognize faces and objects, lauded as a major triumph of deep learning, can fail dramatically when their input is modified even in modest ways by certain types of lighting, image filtering and other alterations that do not affect humans’ recognition abilities in the slightest.

Excerpts from the article 

"Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning" 

by Melanie Mitchell, Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University

The New York Times, 5 November 2018

Life is paradise

afternoon at home

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Matter

Antelope Canyon 2009

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit (orig. geist). This spirit is the matrix of all matter."

Max Planck [1858-1947, German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918]

from Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)

the tonic of wildness

Walden - the book

We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Henry David Thoreau [Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, 1854] 

(free e-book on Project Gutenberg)