Posted originally on Apr 28, 2024 By Martin Armstrong |
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Real AI is not biased. What is being presented as AI is merely clever programming that is steering people into a predetermined conclusion – that is NOT AI.
Category A self Aware computer A Clear and Present Danger
The Great Misconception of AI
Posted originally on Mar 20, 2024 By Martin Armstrong
AI is a hot topic for regulators. Regulators and most companies that offer purported AI are clueless about what constitutes actual AI. Way too many charlatans are out there calling a simple trend-following program AI. They create some rules, and the program just follows what they created. That is NOT Artificial Intelligence.
The SEC is all over this and has already been targeting purported AI companies that call their programs AI when they have a simple buy-sell analogy that may trade-off for an Elliot Wave or Stochastic with inherent BIAS created by their predetermined rule. Any system that has an inherent BIAS is not actually AI.
Yes, Bill Gates predicts that artificial intelligence will transform the world in just five years. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the rise of AI could affect about 40% of jobs around the world. When I went to engineering school, we had to learn both programming and hardware. Back then, StarTrek was on TV and that was the inspiration of everyone in the industry to create a computer that was capable of understanding and running the ship. Even Steve Jobs’s inspiration behind Apple and the iPad came from the visions we had from StarTrek.
I worked with Dragon System back in the eighties when it was hardware you put into a slot in an IBM XT. It would allow the computer to talk. My daughter was fascinated by it. I wrote a program just to be able to hold a conversation with her and taught it how to be a politician. If it ventured into an area it did not know, it would just change the subject. I still remember she came home from school one day, and I had the computer apart, and she began crying that I had killed it. I used my kids to teach me how to write natural language so it would understand the words in a conversation. The good old days.
There is a lot of misguided hope surrounding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. All we need to do is look objectively at IBM project WATSON. Just over a decade ago, artificial intelligence (AI) made one of its showier forays into the public’s consciousness when IBM’s Watson computer appeared on the American quiz show Jeopardy. Watson’s debut performance against two of the show’s most successful contestants was televised to a national viewership across three evenings. In the end, the machine triumphed comfortably.
This was NOT actually AI. It is what I call a look-up program. Even ChatGPT is not capable of actually achieving independent thought. They can understand and go fetch the answer faster than a human. The people I knew back then thought Watson would one day cure cancer. None of that was possible because they fooled themselves about AI.
Most of AI’s dangers are caused by its failure to comprehend what it is capable of doing—especially in trading. This all stems from the distorted idea that our brains are supercomputers and there is no God, for our consciousness is simply created by throwing in a bunch of data, shaking well, and out comes a person. Thus, the thrust to mimic the brain led to the creation of neural nets. But that effort also failed in actually creating original thought.
I bought my first Roman coin, which came when I was perhaps 10 to 13 years old, for $10. It was in the 3rd century when Rome debased its currency. The coin was from Emperor Aurelian (270-275AD). I noticed that what once was silver coins was bronze, but they used a chemical process to bring 20% silver to the surface to make them look like silver coins when first issued. I saw the same thing in our coins in 1965, issuing clad coinage with a copper center and nickel surface, doing the same as the Romans.
I was fascinated with the parallel and realized that if I collected the coinage annually, I could see just how fast Rome fell. We all knew Rome fell, but nobody even determined how fast Rome fell. I used the coinage to plot that out. Many people have copied that chart, but you could not make it without testing the coinage.
I also wrote about when I was in 9th grade; my history teacher brought in an old black-and-white movie named Toast of New York. It was about Jim Fisk and his attempt to corner the gold market that created the Panic of 1869. In that movie, he is looking at the ticker tape quoting gold just hit $162. Because I had a part-time job in a coin/bullion store, I knew the price of gold was $35. Suddenly, what I was being taught in school was wrong. Nothing was linear. It was always a business cycle, for how else could gold be $162 in 1869 and $35 postwar up to 1971?
First of all, this idea that our brains are supercomputers and consciousness is simply a matter of throwing a bunch of data in and out comes consciousness is totally nonsense. A baby knows nothing when born but displays consciousness. My dogs are self-aware. They bark at another dog but put a mirror down, knowing it is themselves. The little one, Josephine, was sick and lying down. I gave Napoleon a treat, and she took it over and gave it to Josephine. I was stunned. They, too, have a consciousness that exists, and it did not come from throwing in a bunch of data.
Any program based on this idea of Machine Language and somehow it will figure out how to trade all by itself is totally absurd. IBM thought Watson could discover the cure for cancer – it did not. As was reported:
“But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. “
Why Machine Learning Has Failed
The entire premise that there is no God and consciousness is achieved by merely throwing in a bunch of data and shaking well has proven to be absolute NONSENSE. The next machine learning program cannot learn to be a doctor any more than it can become a trader. There is something a lot more to this thing we call consciousness. It will NEVER simply emerge from the data – PERIOD!
You cannot create a machine-learning program and expect it to teach you how to trade, cure cancer, or drive a car. I have raced cars. I have driven almost every sort, even a Formula One—NOT professionally in a Formula One. When you are driving, you have to look at everyone around you. You look for the slightest move, which indicates what that driver is thinking. This is that undefinable gut feeling. You cannot code this, and I have been coding AI since the 1970s.
This is why a self-driving car with AI will not really work. It was a grand theory, but there is no possible way you can expect AI to make intuitive judgment decisions – a gut feeling. This is the problem with expecting that AI will replace humans, where it requires a gut feeling.
Therein lies the problem. This expectation that AI can replace human judgment is just fiction. I can mimic emotions on a computer. If you use insulting words, it can hurl an insult back at you. I cannot create actual emotion, nor can I create judgment from a Sixth Sense. This idea that you create a black box, throw in a bunch of data, and out comes an artificial person is absurd.
Someone sent this in when they asked ChapGPT about the difference between it and Socrates. It can look that up and put out the information. It cannot trade any more than it could drive a car. AI will never achieve that human judgment.
To create Socrates, I realized that it could not be a neural net nor a black box where you hope, like IBM, it will figure it all out and somehow emerge as the best trader in history. I taught Socrates how I would look at the world as an international hedge fund manager, comparing everything and looking at the capital flows. You cannot forecast gold in isolation any more than the stock market. EVERYTHING is connected. As I have often said, the US was bankrupt in 1896, and JP Morgan arranged a $100 million gold loan to bail out the country. Without World Wars I & II, the US would never have become the world’s financial capital. Obviously, you cannot forecast the US share market by just looking at the Fed.
While I taught Socrates how to analyze, I created no hard rules like interest rates up and stocks down. Such market beliefs are in themselves fiction. The Fed was raising rates when Trump came to power, and the market rallied, but they called it the Trump Rally. The Romans used olive oil for heat and light. That was replaced with whale oil, which was then replaced by crude oil. Justinian I (527-565AD) issued the first Clean Air Act in 535AD. He proclaimed the importance of clean air as a birthright. “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind—the air, running water, the sea.”
I created no hard relationship rules because relationships ALWAYS change.
Understanding REAL AI
Armstrong Economics Blog/AI Computers Re-Posted Aug 4, 2023 by Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, I attended your 2011 conference in Philadelphia. A friend of mine insisted and paid for the ticket, telling me your computer has been incredible on forecasting long-term that nobody can come close. I confess I thought your forecasts at the event were out there. You put up the war cycle and said it would all begin in 2014. That was three years in advance. There were cameramen there filming what later became the film The Forecaster. I hear they are doing a sequel to show all the forecasts you made ten years ago have come true. I also hear they are doing a Holywood film on you, like the Big Short.
You have accomplished what nobody else has done, and you are even a legend in markets and were even a speaker at the American Hackers convention in computers. With all the craziness going on about Artificial Intelligence, some people call it a threat to humanity, and others seem to be hinting that AI might take over everything. So there is no better person to speak about this than you. Are we at risk from AI, or is the hype some excuse claiming AI starts the war, not the people, as a cover-up?
DS
ANSWER: ChatGPT has dazzled the world and led everybody to think that AI will be something like the movie Terminator or The Matrix. I will dig out the old program I wrote in the early 1980s for my children. It was a simple program where I taught the computer to have a conversation. I would ask a question like – Do you have a dog? My daughter would reply yes. Of what is their name? She would then say the name. It stored all that info so the next time she went to the computer; it would ask: How is your dog Buttons? One day she came home from school and saw I had the computer apart, and she started crying, saying I killed it.
Back then, I worked with Dragon Systems. They produced hardware that you plugged in a board in the slot of an old IBM XT, and the computer would speak. She would bring over her girlfriends to prove to them her computer talked to her.
The point is that such a program is not really AI in the sense that it is self-aware to the point it will take over the world. With the introduction of the internet, such a program that has free reign to search can provide astonishing answers. Nevertheless, this is by no means self-aware.
The theory behind these wild claims entirely rests upon this theory that there is no God, we have no soul, and our entire existence is no more than a biological supercomputer. Therefore, they presume that if you through in enough data, some miracle will emerge, and it will become conscious just as a living being. That may make a great movie, but I think I am pretty well advanced in AI, and aside from disagreeing with this theory, I can write code that will make you think it is alive, but that is just mimicking human interaction. I do not know of any possible way to create a fully conscious AI system. It is only theory.
As far as Socrates is concerned, I poured myself into the program. It is NOT a neural net that you hope for the best. I taught Socrates how to analyze and know history, so I did not hardwire relationships. That is why it has discovered things and can do long-term forecasting beyond anything out there. As I have said, we are all connected. You cannot forecast a single market in isolation – you will always be wrong caught by the wildcard from an external market. They lost in Russia in 1998 and needed cash in the middle of a liquidity crisis. So they started selling assets everywhere to raise money to cover their losses in Russia. You would never have seen that coming just by looking at a single market.
Artificial Intelligence Positioned to Define Terms of Reality
Posted originally on the CTH on July 12, 2023 | Sundance
There has been a great deal of increased discussion surrounding the issues of automated Artificial Intelligence, colloquially called “AI.”
At the central core of the AI issues in communication; you inevitably enter a discussion on the issue of definitions and terms. Who is determining the definitions of what constitutes valid information? Who is determining what types of information are not valid, not approved for communication networks and how are their definitions being applied?
A solid and short-read thread on the assembly of people, groups and institutions surrounding the issue of AI in communication and media is presented HERE.
[Article/Thread LINK]
The topic of AI in general is a very large conversation. The topic of AI specific to communication is equally large and perhaps even more significant.
AI applied to communication must first establish a need for it to exist. Within that discussion, government interests and corporate interests take large seats at the table. Social media platforms, communication outlets, almost the entire technology sector and various special interest groups are also stakeholders in the discussion of how AI can be applied to the filtering of information – or what I would more appropriately call the CONTROL of information.
The predicate of the conversation jumps around a little, but the issue of defining reality is throughout the discussion. This is where my prior warnings about defining information must be emphasized. I am losing the current argument, but I retain optimism that eventually the control mechanisms will need to be destroyed by a generation that falls under its influence.
“There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “malinformation”. There is only information. There is information you accept and information you do not accept. You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”
There are only two elements within the public discussion of information – truth and not truth.
In an era filled with “fact-checkers” and institutional guardians at the gates of Big Tech, let me explain exactly why it is important not to accept the speech rules of the guards.
When you accept the terms “disinformation”, “misinformation” or the newest lingo, “malinformation,” you are beginning to categorize truth and lies in various shades. You are merging black and white, right and wrong, into various shades of grey.
When your mind works in the grey zone, you are, by direct and factual consequence, saying there is a problem. You are correct; however, this is where people may make a mistake. The problem is supposed to be there.
It is not a solution to the problem to try and remove the grey simply because it takes too much work to separate the white pixels from the black ones. You were born with a gift, the greatest gift a loving God could provide. You were born with a brain and set of natural instincts that are tools to do this pixel separation, use them.
If you define the grey work as a problem you cannot solve on your own, you open the door for others to solve that problem for you. You begin to abdicate the work, and that’s when trouble can enter.
The sliding scale of Pinocchios is one of the most familiar yet goofy outcomes.
Put more clearly, when you accept the terminology “disinformation”, you accept a problem.
The problem is then the tool by which authorities will step in to make judgements.
Speech, in its most consequential form, is then qualified by others to whom you have sub-contracted your thinking.
When you willingly sub-contract information filters to others, you have lost connection with the raw information.
CTH was founded upon the belief that truth has no agenda, nor does it care about you, your feelings, or your opinion of it. It just sits there, empirically existing as evidence of information in its most pure form.
The search for truth, in all things, is the mission objective of this assembly. Often, we don’t like the truth; often, the truth is bitter, cold, challenging and even painful to accept. However, the truth doesn’t care.
Information in its most raw form is ambivalent to your opinion. If you struggle to accept these things, that’s when you need grey. The New York Times is not called the “grey lady” accidentally.
Personally, I am an absorber of information – perhaps on a scale that is unusual. But I do not discount information from any form until I can put context to it and see if the information makes sense given all the variables present.
When something doesn’t feel right, it’s almost always because it isn’t right.
Often, I find myself struggling in the grey and complex. It is not unusual to spend days researching, digging, clarifying a situation, only to discover the path to finding the truth is in another direction entirely. Erasing everything and starting over is frustrating, but it is genuinely the only approach that works; and often finding truth is supposed to be difficult, that’s why it is rewarding.
In the digital information age, we are bombarded with information. It is easy to be overwhelmed and need to find something or someone who has better skills at separating the black grains from the white ones. All opinions in this quest should be considered; thus, it is important to allow the free flow of information.
I am not necessarily a speech absolutist. There is some language that needs to be constrained if we are to participate in a respectful society, with grandma’s rules and knowing the audience. The CTH has guidelines for comments for this exact reason. However, those constraints need to be based on a set of inherent values. When it comes to information it is important to draw a distinction from speech.
There needs to be an open venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there’s an opportunity for information to be manipulated – even weaponized. Saul Alinsky spent decades pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech. Alinsky’s intentions in the endeavor to change society by changing how language and information was used were not good. He devoted his completed rulebook to Lucifer.
Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove speech from the discussion. Be careful about those who advocate to automate this process via Artificial Intelligence filters.
You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a God-given brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.
Teach your family, especially your children and grandchildren, to view information only insofar as it is valuable to your understanding the real world based on morals and virtues. Upstream, those who are now defining the rules and terms of automated information filtering do not carry those same morals and virtues.
No one is going to get to avoid this issue. We are on a glidepath to a future that was/is entirely predictable.
Tucker Carlson Interviews Elon Musk – Part 2 Full Video
Posted originally on the CTH on April 19, 2023 | Sundance
The second half of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Elon Musk is below. The second part is most esoteric discussion about the current state of U.S. and geopolitical affairs with further discussion of AI, the banking industry and the future of human life as quantified by the viability of civilization. {Direct Rumble link} WATCH:
Centinel2012 