Wherein a Twitter user dispels the illusions of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Here’s the news report on the mystery. It turns out a YouTuber illegally uploaded clips from a fifteen-year-old Japanese TV show that featured “Over Your Shoulder” by Dinosaur Jr. Japanese viewers started to binge on the videos, and social media created a self-reinforcing feedback loop. When Dinosaur Jr. charted above Ariana Grande, the YouTuber got spooked and scrubbed all the clips from his channel. That left Billboard scratching their heads as to how the anomaly happened.
Pretty fucking terrifying, yes.
“Machine learning” is rhetorical at best and more literally a contradiction in terms. “Learning” is predicated on an intellect, and man can never build a machine with a true rational intellect. Intelligence isn’t a matter of sufficient complexity or processing power, as shown by the potentially disastrous results of entrusting scientific research to massive lumps of code.
As should always have been apparent, the scientific method’s efficacy relies on scientists’ informed intellects, and its accuracy relies on their freedom to run valid experiments. Since both the intellect and the will are non-material faculties, it doesn’t matter how much silicon you stack up. Only trained human beings can do science.
A corollary to the thread above pointed out by another Twitter user: Science is as self-correcting as accounting.
None of this is to say that we won’t have increasingly sophisticated Chinese room style “A.I.”, and it’s always fun to speculate about artificial intelligence in science fiction. Soft A.I. figures prominently in my martial thriller series Combat Frame XSeed. Read it now:
