[FRIAM] How soon until AI takes over polling?

[Steve Smith]

Frank Wrote

> In the late 60s I worked on Project Talent in which data for 440,000
> high school students was collected and analyzed.  This included , test
> scores, interests, socioeconomic status, etc. I've mentioned this
> before.  The project included longitudinal following of the
> participants for decades.  That following was done by telephone and
> mail.  There were methods for assessing "non-respondent bias" by using
> aggressive follow-up such as searching for them and doing interviews. 
> That data was used to estimate information about those who were not
> reached.
I'm always fascinated by the range of projects you have worked on,
especially straddling the traditional "two cultures" divide.   I can't
quite glean from the above description how all that turned out or what
you learned from the process...  but it sounds like part of a larger
movement to tighten up the "soft sciences" that was significant?
> Don't some AI systems include subsystems for explaining their reasoning?

I believe this to be the 'holy grail' of (all?) machine learning
systems... I worked with UNM on some attempts to explicate the activity
and structure of evolving neural nets, traffic on the network fabric of
HPC clusters, network traffic at the LANL firewall, and the dynamics of
interconnected national infrastructure systems.    I do not feel that we
ever made more than minimal/superficial progress on this problem and it
remains to be deeply interesting.   I have a (mostly) unsubstantiated
belief that there will be discoverable structure in these AI/ML systems
which somehow reflects their function.   The epitome of the
structure/function duality?

>
> Happy Veterans Day,

I often wonder how many of this August Body served in the military?   I
was precisely 4 months too young to have to sign up for the draft and
turned 18 13 months after the Sec. of Defense declared an "all Volunteer
Army".   The *final* lottery for selective service was held 1 month
after I turned 18 but only applied to those 1 year older than me.   As a
matter of practicality, no actual conscription had occurred since I
turned 15 but that was only evident in retrospect, it felt that any of
those decisions could have been reversed on a whim (until the
requirement to sign up for selective service was dropped).

I was torn, having been raised in a very solid redneck-patriotic culture
where the opportunity to go off and be a hero was considered the apex of
a young man's opportunities.   I believed in the ideals of service and
duty to country.  But I also heard the larger voice of discord which
(strongly) suggested that the current war was without any legitimacy and
that the way the members of the military were treated did not align with
the ideals presented as the *reason* for patriotic service.  I was torn
between the polarized positions that as a young man, my only options
were to become a "yellow-bellied pinko-commie-fag draft dodger" or "a
baby killer".   Well before the announcement of an "all volunteer army"
I had decided that I almost assuredly could not give my soul (and
possibly my life) to my government.   The paradoxes implied by a
government "by, for, and of" the people conscripting it's young and
naive into a project (dominating Southeast Asia and beyond) and then
throwing (many of) them away (I was hearing the stories of poorly
conceived/executed campaigns/missions in Viet Nam).

My father served in WWII and my grandfather in WWI, each just young
enough to only be involved in "mop up" operations, not the actual
conflicts.  They were (uber) proud of their involvement and had no
doubts that any and all military actions by our US Gov't were
intrinsically righteous, even though both of  them had their own
suspicions of a variety of US Government bureaucracies they engaged over
time.  

IN answer to my own question above (how many of us served?) is that I
suspect it is a small number... I suspect those among us who were of an
age to have been potentially conscripted, obtained our advanced
educations (which is not pervasive here, but significant) *while*
delaying conscription?   While I ultimately took significant umbrage
with virtually *all* of our military aspirations, I don't transfer too
much of that to the individuals who served, each for their own reasons
with their own circumstances and with their own performance and
resulting strengths (or damage) from their experiences.

- Steve