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BITWASTES_DUMBGOD

                                             October 30, 2021
                                             October 04, 2022

                                                   BITWASTES

David Auerbach
"Bitwise: A Life in Code", p.190:

    "Many predict the miracles of artificial
    intelligence, from perfect robot
    companionship to perfect economic
    management, but our ever-enlarging
    corporate networks are governed less by
    rationality than by a slapdash assemblage
    of heuristics and approximations that
    slouch toward the chance operations of
    the Lottery in Babylon.  Such heaps of
    code work best when 75 to 80 percent
    success is good enough, as with search        Auerbach immediately walks
    results or content filtering.  When every     some of this back in a
    mistake stands out, as with voice             footnote, commenting on the
    recognition or translation, these             "stunning" improvements in
    titanic, labyrinthine systems look far        voice recognition .
    less impressive.  Google is a dumb god."
                                                    It's a point: in the
                                                    mid-80s I wasn't sure
                                                    we'd ever get working
                                                    voice recognition.

                                                    Optical Character
                                                    Recognition only barely
                                                    worked with typewritten
                                                    text in a known font--
                                                    now it's done routinely
                                                    with human handwriting.

                                                    But it's also true that
                                                    there's something *stupid*
                                                    about these algorithms: we
                                                    don't know how they work,
                                                    and we don't understand
                                                    what they're doing-- we've
                                                    invented a new blind
                                                    watchmaker.







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