ChatGpt's Errors

 My cousin and I were discussing the early textile mills in New England.  I thought I remembered Europeans visiting the mills, particularly Lowell, and writing about them.  So I asked ChatGpt.  I can't copy the response, which is curious since I've done it before, but it listed Harriet Martineau, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur as a French writer, Isaac Weld, and William Strickland.

The Strickland reference is definitely wrong; he didn't write the book listed.  Both Weld and Strickland are cited as visiting New England in the 1790s, which seems too early for the mills.  Martineau seems dubious based on the description in Wikipedia, as does Crevecoeur. 

It looks to me that ChatGpt confused opinions on slavery which all four people expressed with visits to mills,

ChatGPT and Congress

 Yesterday there was a report, which I may be garbling, that Google had given ChatGPT the same test questions they give to engineering job applicants, and the AI qualified as a level 3, apparently an entry level.  The starting salary for level 3 was given as about $180K, more than the starting salary for a new member of Congress, not to mention a member of considerable seniority. 

Not sure what that says about AI, Google, Congress, or the US. 

Does ChatGpt Mean End of Wikipedia

 Some see ChatGPT as a threat to Google.  Might well be, but won't it be equally a threat to Wikipedia? Humans, being lazy, don't really care about accuracy and objectivity; give them a story whichs seem coherent and it will be good enough.

Changing My Mind on AI

This report by kottke on the advances in AI, particularly the advances in learning, makes me change my mind.  I've been relatively conservative on my expectations for AI.  I remember back in the late 80's getting excited by the possibility of using AI to make "person " determinations for payment limitation purposes.  That evaporated under the pressure of other demands on time and resources and the wide gap between us program specialists and the private consultant types we were talking to.

Over the years I've followed with some interest the progress of chess playing software, which finally beat the best human player a few years ago.  But the slowest of the progress and the narrow limits of the field meant to me I should take the dramatic predictions of the future of AI with a big dose of salt.

But now I've changed.  Why?  Because of the advance in AI in learning how to do AI. If I understand it, the key is setting a desired criteria--what it means to "win" a chess game--provide starting conditions and letting the computer teach itself, by playing itself repeatedly and changing the program used based on the outcome--if a difference in the program brings the outcome closer to the desired criteria, incorporate it.

So the important thing is the improved strategy for AI, and presumably a strategy which can be applied to any situation where you can identify a desired criteria, a definite outcome.  It's "learning how to learn" applied to software. 

[Update: a piece in Technology Review on the subject. Perhaps a bit more balanced than the Kottke piece.]

Trump Stumps Computers?

From the ever-reliable Kevin Drum, as the end to a post on AI advances:

"Alternatively, this merely represents the Donald Trump effect. News articles in 2017 are stuffed with bizarre Trump quotes, and even the best machine translation software probably chokes when it tries to make sense of them. When it comes to bafflegab, humans are still the world champs."

Jobs, Automation: Craft Brewing and Women's Cheesemaking

Had lunch Wed in a Herndon strip mall, next door to a craft brewery which throughout our lunch had a long line of people buying their new release.  That's new, at least new to me.  Back in the day we had a bunch of companies each brewing their own brand.  Then the whole industry consolidated into a couple/three big conglomerates, killing most of the brand names.  Then we saw the gradual growth of micro-breweries, and then a rapid expansion.  See this page for statistics from the brewers association.  It's going so fast wikipedia can't keep up.

Meanwhile the paper (NYTimes?) recently had an article on women farmers making cheese.  Also a new thing. And finally today the Post has a piece on new young farmers, who are described as being part of what I'd call the "food movement" (i.e., small, organic, community supported ag).

Seems to me in the recent debate over AI and the likelihood of robots replacing humans in all jobs we forget the ability of humans to invent new desires and to invest their time in uneconomic ways.  Can we create robots which are irrational?

Economic Creativity: New Occupations

How many words do you need to discuss an Amish farmer, deer farms, the production of deer urine, bowhunters and the need to disguise their scent, the problem of chronic wasting disease, and good/bad government regulation?

See this short New Yorker piece.

I'm more impressed by our the market economy and human desires endlessly create new jobs, particularly in a context of fearing the loss of jobs to AI.