[FRIAM] A* and emulatoin

[Steve Smith]

Oh my!   I heard nothing of it until now

We are heading back to our own Tornado Alley...  flying into Denver... 
(far western edge) and then Mary to Wisconsin which is on the 
northeastern edge.  I checked weather and it was suggested that there 
might have been 6" (15cm) hail in Minnesota?   I see/hear Santa Fe has 
been under early monsoons and that is calming the otherwise 
out-of-control Pecos fire(s) but that California is starting to see more 
lightning caused fires (so far a modest reprieve this year).

Zelazny/SciFi fans might check out the 1960s? "Damnation Alley" or skip 
forward to Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"...


On 6/28/22 7:18 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday. Hope you are OK? 
> Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too warm for this season. We 
> have July temperatures in June. Probably another sign of climate change
> https://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
> Date: 6/26/22 09:16 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
>
> This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble membrane 
> first thing this morning (CET):
>
> https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099
>
> which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here of 
> late.  It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but useful?) 
> the Turing Test is.  The TT represents precisely "the glitch".    I 
> think this idea points in the general direction of conscious 
> empathy...   if we recognize language fluency *as* mental fluency, 
> then it is more obvious that we would grant others who present 
> language fluency as being similar to ourselves, possibly assuming that 
> "other" is closer to "not other" simply because of the familiar 
> language that flows out of us.
>
> In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a half-dozen 
> languages with half as many accents/dialects each... In 
> english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here and there 
> but the accent referenced it with every lilt.   This was not 
> unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same", but in Wales, 
> the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and the 
> romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was overwhelmingly 
> unfamiliar.  When I read a sign, I felt like I was left with a 
> mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had to spit out just to 
> clear my vocal passage to start on the next phrase.
>
>   It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues struggling 
> with the various anglifications of the hispanification of a dozen 
> different native American languages (starting in my neighborhood with 
> Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding out withe Keres and Dine' and Zuni ...)  
> The (nearly conventional/normalized) rendering of most of these 
> languages is for me familiar enough that I don't struggle or wince, 
> but after (especially Welsh)... "I get it".   When confronted with 
> each British accent (I couldn't identify or distinguish many if any) 
> it took a few hours at least to become habituated enough to not be 
> disturbed (intrigued or put off, depending) by the unfamiliar sound 
> patterns and often idiomatic constructions.
>
> I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I did 
> Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections between 
> Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin words/phrases in science 
> made it much more familiar than French.  The tiny bit of French I 
> think I am habituated to are a few Americanized stock phrases and 
> maybe a very little bit of dialogue from movies...  After a week of 
> hearing almost nothing *but* French it no longer felt outrageously 
> "Other" even if I couldn't hardly parse a thing out of a 
> run-together-spoken-phrase.   Mary and I observed one another trying 
> to speak English to someone who did not speak much if any and we 
> realized that we were both prone to repeat the same sentence with a 
> word choice or two changed, but more emphatically (and therefore more 
> run-together) each time.   Not helpful, and perhaps what the few 
> French who bothered to speak to us once it was established that we had 
> no language in common, were doing themselves.   It was hard to 
> recognize even word-breaks in the word-salad coming at us.    The 
> little German we were exposed to had a *different* set of familiar 
> words and sounds and I think the English and German might have a much 
> stronger phonemic overlap, making it not sound quite as foreign... 
> though I was left wanting to clear my throat after hearing much spoken 
> german...  and then here in the Netherlands with *many* 
> English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more comfortable...   
> and much of the written Dutch is familiar even when the pronunciation 
> is a git foreign.
>
>     https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special
>
> In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this article 
> which was a bit more interesting to me.   The point they make about 
> human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks differently (acutely 
> illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf and dumb" or "dumb-mute" 
> for those who could not speak (due to deafness, aphasia, or perhaps 
> some trauma?   The line from the Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard 
> comes to mind:  "That deaf, dumb and blind kid, could sure play a mean 
> pin ballll!"
>
> A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was:  "Don't mistake 
> an accent for a personality"...
>
> It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in 
> discussing AI, etc.  A* really.   Intelligence, Reasoning, Life, 
> Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum.   And yet it is useful (I think) to 
> note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at the same 
> time.   Each is a facet or reflection of the other. The second article 
> seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I think more aptly 
> "emotional knowledge".    My very first (and practically only) 
> published "artpiece"  was a visual study on the distinction between 
> "knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI climbing the steep part of the 
> hill toward a pinnacle (or more likely series of false summits) of 
> "knowing about" without possibly getting at all any closer (at all) to 
> "knowing".
>
> This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is learning 
> anything more than imitation/emulation?"
>
> Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I find 
> that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people is, in 
> fact, with their bureaucratic roles.  I am seeking a transaction... 
> knowledge, information, material goods, a service.   And given the 
> level of the mutual (mis)understanding I've been enduring for over a 
> month now in those transactions, It now feels like a luxury to expect 
> a service person to articulate their preferences and basis of their 
> preferences in a given baked good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even 
> (gawdess forbid) Beer!    But it has trained me to "listen for 
> emotional content" more than substance.   If I ask for a "Blonde" or a 
> "Bruun" or a "Trippel" or a "Wit" and they rattle off something about 
> one or more of them, I will choose one based on the level of 
> excitement in their voice-eye over any imagined information content 
> their response implied.   I am sometimes disappointed but almost 
> always surprised.   The vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to 
> language) what I am familiar with amongst American Craft beers but my 
> exploration is wider (through clumsiness if nothing else).   My best 
> strategy is simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally".  
> Also a good strategy for food it seems.
>
>
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