concretize your imagination

I recently listened to two talks involving machine learning and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is to program machines to work like human intelligence. Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of AI that involves computer programming techniques that contribute to the concretization of AI. Part of the work that I do involves some machine learning, in which statistical or mathematical models are constructed, trained and evaluated in its ability to either detect some pattern or discriminate between groups. I understand that persons in my field of practice have qualms about ML—I think part of it is that black boxes of algorithms are involved. I remember many of my grad school professors demonstrating how the statistical software we use is simply speeding up what can be hand calculated. So imagine when you have these amazing new computational processes that are so esoteric that to find a way to manually cross-check and ensure the quality and robustness of the resulting numbers is cumbersome and nearly impossible—then you expect some seasoned practitioners to be skeptical and averse. I'm probably wrong and there is a way to cross-check and that the skepticism is due to something else.

But that’s where things are going now right? Science fiction is quickly becoming science fact. Just think about Star Trek’s Tricorder device where you just put it near something or someone and it can answer whatever question you have about it. We have all these chatbots and smart speakers now. If the human mind can conceptualize it, it already exists and can become real. Aye there’s the rub, of course. There are many possibilities of exciting development yet many possibilities that could lead to dystopia. I am hoping for a higher degree of the former and minimum-to-none of the latter.

The past few weeks since I last posted, I was very much immersed in computational stuff and healthy, constructive arguments with collaborators, partly ML related. I am not a data scientist so ML is not in my bread-and-butter applications yet it's nearly inescapable to me now. Like any kind of group or team work (the good kind), people see things with different lenses and that is important. The end result is a good compromise. A group full of “yes” or full of “no” people will keep the group stuck in a rut. It’s like a group trek up a mountain with each member equipped with a specialized tool or skill, and each one possesses something similar that can be shared. Also these past few weeks, I looked forward to the end of the day or the weekend to watch a film or series. Some of the things I’m so happy to have seen include the latest episodes of The Rings of Power, Lockout, The Martian, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The last two films involved some AI. It’s where we are headed now…just blurting out prompts and obtaining some desired result. Like this likeness of my lunch that was generated by Google Gemini after I prompted it to create a picture of a green smoothie in a mason jar on top of a kitchen table in a Mars space station:  

Image generated by Google Gemini