Is AI More Artificial Than Intelligent? Is Wikipedia Better Than AI Chatbots ChatGPT & Google Bard?

Is Artificial Intelligence more artificial than intelligent? What does the term artificial
intelligence really mean?
Will Artificial Intelligence replace drivers, programmers, and attorneys in future
years?
How can high school teachers and college professors tell if AI applications such as
SnapGPT or Google’s Bard have written a student’s essay?
What are the proper uses of AI and Wikipedia in research? Which is more useful?
For companies adopting AI: Should profitability trump customer service?
Will it ever be possible to prevent AI robots with zero comprehension from saying
stupid, insensitive, or grossly inaccurate stuff? How can an AI engine dependably
detect garbage in its input?

Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments. Let us learn and reflect together!
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The author of a recent Atlantic article who is not a
programmer, but who has all these impressive journalistic
credentials, claims that computers have learned how to
write code, with a subhead: “In the age of AI, computer
science is no longer the safe major.” As a programmer, I
know this is totally ludicrous, and the AI programming
tools are just that: tools. What is clearly happening is now
that AI is the buzzword, every web-based program is
claiming that their latest product implements AI, because
it is the latest sexy thing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/computer-science-degree-value-generative-ai-age/675452/

What is artificial intelligence? The original definition by Alan Turing is that
a program is deemed artificially intelligent if the user conversing by
keyboard is convinced that a live human being is responding. But keep in
mind that artificially intelligent computer programs have zero
comprehension. Although they can do quite well on intelligence tests,
answering questions instantaneously, they are incapable of original
thought. However, computers excel at pattern matching, and the latest AI
programs can replicate text from existing text samples. The program does
not comprehend the meaning of these text samples, which means it has
trouble evaluating their credibility. Thus, the generated output is often
what programmers call GIGO: garbage-in, garbage-out.

The Turing Bombe machine that read German enigma encrypted messages could be seen as an early AI application.

Admittedly, there are both impressive and problematic artificially intelligent
applications. Highly accurate grammar checkers have been available for decades,
though the current application Grammarly is not one-hundred percent accurate, I
find it highly useful and accurate enough. Even when a grammar checker flags a
phrase that is technically correct, I find that often I can reword the entire sentence
to increase its clarity.
Even more impressive are the programs that translate from one language to
another, they perform nearly flawlessly with most ordinary sentences. Less
impressive are the dictation programs. When I broke my finger and was forced to try
the Microsoft Word dictation programs, I was less impressed. The program
especially bungles ancient Greek and Roman names, hearing ordinary words
instead. Recording your dictation and having a computer program translate the
audio file is much more accurate, as can be seen by the generated transcripts for
YouTube videos.

Then there are the problematic artificial intelligence
applications, such as fully automated robotic automobiles
that have no empathy for people they run over when they
encounter unusual situations, or totally normal situations
that for some odd reason the robot thinks are abnormal.
Dr Wikipedia has a good discussion of the problems
surrounding driverless cars, pointing out there are
industry-defined levels of automation. And facial-
recognition software, which we will discuss later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car

Why AI Cannot Write Computer Programs
Recently, a non-programmer award-winning journalist
opines: “ChatGPT and other chatbots can do more
than compose full essays in an instant; they can also
write lines of code in any number of programming
languages. You can’t just type: ‘Make me a video game
into ChatGPT,’ and get something that’s playable on
the other end, but many programmers have now
developed rudimentary smartphone apps coded by AI.
In the ultimate irony, software engineers helped
create AI, and now they are the American workers
who think it will have the biggest impact on their
livelihoods, according to a new survey from Pew
Research Center. So much for learning to code.”

The reality is that computers have been generating code snippets
for decades. In fact, Microsoft had to generate code for base
Windows applications to wean programmers from the far-easier-
to-code non-graphic DOS applications. Not only, for decades,
have their programming environments like Visual Basic, and now
many other languages, generated hundreds of lines of code for
whatever type of shell application you like, but also when you
start writing your program, an intelligent code generation
program, Intellisense, suggests what programming objects are
available when you type the separating dot, but you need to
know enough what they mean so you know what to pick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(.NET)

Our author continues: “Coders are
now using AI” “to accelerate the
more routine parts of their job, such
as debugging lines of code. In one
study, software developers with
access to GitHub’s Copilot chatbot
were able to finish a coding task 56
percent faster than those who did it
solo. In ten years, or maybe five,
coding bots may be able to do so
much more.”

What was the coding task optimized in the study
mentioned in this article? Microsoft ran a test, some
participants were allowed to use a chatbot-like tool,
Copilot, specialized for computer programs, to assist
them in writing their code, and other participants
wrote the application as they normally would.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.06590.pdf

This was the task: “Participants were
instructed to write an HTTP server in
JavaScript,” there were likely many
examples of this generic code in the
GitHub repository, which users
voluntarily contributed to. Copilot
works best for users coding in
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby,
and Go. Other types of more unusual
programs may have far fewer
examples to draw from, so the gain
would be far less.

This is not my specialty, so I found a Reddit discussion: “GitHub
Copilot - what's your experience been like? Worth it?” Some
programmers liked it, others did not, but nobody thought that it
was magic. Evidently, this tool works like Intellisense, except that
it draws suggestions from an unfiltered codebase that may be
flawed or just plain wrong, and you need to be a talented
programmer to know the difference. Before this tool was
available, programmers could ask for help from Dr Google or
Reddit or Stack Overflow, often someone has written similar
code that you can copy or follow to begin your project.

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/11hmsqp/github_copilot_whats_your_experience_been_like/

Once you write the original version of the code, you are only five percent
there. And no, in most applications, AI programs cannot help you debug your
code. Quite often, even for comparatively simple programs, you have run the
code dozens and dozens and dozens of times to find all the logical errors in
your code. If you write code in a proprietary language, forget AI, people will
not be as ready to share their code, which means the AI engine will have
nothing to draw from. Not to mention that accounting programs and many
other programs read data from a myriad of different databases assembled in
a maze of relationships with field names that are unique to the business, and
the SQL, XML, and/or JSON commands to query this data are yet more
computer languages. Artificial intelligence is not magic, no computer program
will ever be able to write code addressing the varied circumstances you
encounter in the real world.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center 2017

Millennium Falcon Panorama: Smugglers Run, DisneyWorld, Orlando, FL

Human Naivety Makes AI Dangerous

Another Atlantic article written by a real programmer
discusses the real dangers of artificial intelligence with a
task that it is well-suited for: facial recognition. But it is
not perfect, facial recognition works well with white faces,
but with less accuracy with black or brown faces, due to
the lack of contrasts.
The real nightmare of artificial intelligence is when
corporate and government bureaucrats rely on artificial
intelligence, even when the computer’s total lack of
intelligence is abundantly obvious.

The author observes: “A program
doesn’t always work as expected in
the wild. In recent years, I’ve read
with awe reports of AI systems
revealing themselves to be not
mythical, sentient, and unstoppable,
but grounded, fragile, and fickle. A
pregnant Black woman, Porcha
Woodruff, was arrested after a false
facial recognition match.” “Maria” from “Metropolis” movie:
Statue in Babelsberg, Germany

She continues, “Brian Russell spent years
clearing his name from an algorithm’s false
accusation of unemployment fraud.
Tammy Dobbs, an elderly woman with
cerebral palsy, lost 24 hours of home care
each week because of algorithmic
troubles. Davone Jackson reported that he
was locked out of the low-income housing
his family needed to escape homelessness
because of a false flag from an automated
tenant-screening tool.” And heaven forbid
if you have a name like Jim Smith, you will
have lots of false positives.

What is also true is that many of the government systems that determine
eligibility for government programs such as welfare and unemployment
benefits often use programmed checklists that deny benefits for the
wrong answers. What is missing is often there are exceptions for these
questions, or the courts may not have decided on unique circumstances,
so that YES-NO answers are really not possible.
These problems are basically caused by stupid humans who do not
recognize that computer programs have zero comprehension, and naively
assume they cannot make mistakes, and refuse to listen to sensible
complaints. Again, this is GIGO, if the data input is garbage, the results
regurgitated will also be garbage.

Problem of Deep Fakes & Facial Recognition

Another danger is the deep-fake problem, altering photographs to show
people in places where they have never been, and saying slanders they
never said, which could lead to many dirty tricks in a political campaign.
Also, face recognition algorithms are dangerous because of their false
positives.
China has been using facial recognition technology to monitor and
control its population using a wide array of public facing cameras. They
call it Skynet! Among its many millions of faces in China there may be
hundreds or even thousands of false positives. Imagine being thrown in
jail or tortured because a machine mistook you for someone else!

There was a recent movie that featured drones that
searched for victims using facial recognition
technology. Worse, the technology probably exists
today for a drone to detect whether a face exists and
target the person behind the face. What if Hamas
had gotten their hands on drones like that? How
much more horrifying would their slaughter near
Gaza have been!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system

The author concludes: “The truth is,
‘Artificial Intelligence’ does not exist. The
technology may be real, but the term itself is
air. More specifically, it’s the heated breath
of anyone with a seat across from the
people with the authority to set the rules. AI
can be the enthused pitch of a marketing
executive. Or it can be the exhausted sigh of
someone tired and perhaps confused about
how minute engineering decisions could
upend their entire life.”

I agree with all of this author’s arguments, and I agree that
AI technology is real. But the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is
a phrase like any other, we simply need to define it.
Probably the most practical definition is also quite vague,
AI is simply the sum of the most impressive recent
programming achievements in pattern recognition and
pattern replication. A more accurate definition may be that
everything that a computer program achieves is artificially
intelligent, that is why programmers create computer
programs!

This photo reminds
me of my visit to a
satellite tracking
station when I was
a young boy scout.
They had a TV on,
and they: Watch,
You Will Be
Amazed.
They rewound
some huge reels,
and then they
played it back, it
was that same TV
program being
replayed!!!

Another Atlantic article discusses how huge industrial
robots in factories have occasionally killed workers in
industrial accidents, and it also discusses the
problems Tesla has been trying to overcome in its
experimental driverless cars, with hyperlinks for
many of these examples:

Robotic assembly
line in a Tesla
manufacturing
facility.
Historically, the
first tasks
automated in auto
manufacturing
were the tasks that
humans should not
be performing, for
health reasons,
primarily painting,
especially painting
the interior of the
vehicle.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/robot-safety-standards-regulation-human-fatalities/675231/
Another Atlantic article states that “since the
first-known death resulting from the feature in
January 2016, Tesla’s Autopilot has been
implicated in more than forty deaths according
to official report estimates.”

The Atlantic article continues:
“Malfunctioning Teslas on Autopilot have
deviated from their advertised
capabilities by misreading road markings,
suddenly veering into other cars or trees,
crashing into well-marked service
vehicles, or ignoring red lights, stop signs,
and crosswalks. We’re concerned that AI-
controlled robots already are moving
beyond accidental killing in the name of
efficiency and ‘deciding’ to kill someone
in order to achieve opaque and remotely
controlled objectives.”

Is the author suggesting that Elon Musk has been
ignoring the First Law of Robotics suggested by Isaac
Asimov, that robots should never injure or kill
humans?

Can AI Be Useful for Research?

Personally, I view the Dr Google search engine as a type of artificial
intelligence, although it is no longer considered cutting edge or sexy, as it
has been around for many years. There is an alternate shell, Google
Scholar, that returns many of the same results for scholarly topics, but
also reveals the number of citations it finds for referenced articles.
Atlantic published another article by a high school teacher bemoaning
how the chatbots generated text that was indistinguishable from an essay
by a lazy high school student who throws something together at the last
moment from Cliff notes. What is the answer? Perhaps at a minimum, a
teacher should request that their students write a summary of their
essays after they turn them in. Also, teachers should insist on proper
footnotes, something that the current generation of chatbots omit.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/chatgpt-rebirth-high-school-english/675189/

As a test, and we have included the detailed results of this test in
a separate blog, we asked the November 2023 version of
ChatGPT 3.5 and Google Bard several questions of increasing
difficulty.
We asked for essays on:
• Summary and detailed accounts of the Peloponnesian Wars.
• The three, perhaps four, Platonic dialogues on love.
• Possible Genetic and Epigenetic Causes for Dementia
We asked these questions first without any qualifiers, then
requested essays WITH COMMENTARY, WITH SOURCES, and
WITH FOOTNOTES.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2023
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
affiliate commissions.
Link to blog for TEST: https://wp.me/pachSU-TN

https://youtu.be/1ra58mg33nM
https://youtu.be/wyjWBAG6xrc
https://youtu.be/b7QLp1HrOMs
https://youtu.be/SW9Zq4IiLF0

https://youtu.be/z6X3pwVTdrc https://youtu.be/BOtavup_N4g
https://youtu.be/WbCARvApLNk
https://youtu.be/HrSZ5SPUZ7Y

https://youtu.be/F9NmDiiPowI https://youtu.be/4ujlV3a7Il8
https://youtu.be/VqR7y0Z8bYk https://youtu.be/9vPK05gs8BQ

What is my background? Those who graduate from college with a
computer science degree are often over-enthusiastic about the
magic of technology. Although I have been interested in personal
computers since near the beginning of the personal computer
era, buying a luggable blue Kaypro. I spent the first twenty years
of my career as an accountant as an early implementer of
computers, followed by another twenty years as a programmer
of accounting systems, and my career for the next twenty years
will be spent in freelance journalism. So, although I am an
enthusiast of technology, this enthusiasm is tempered by
practical experience and a more conservative outlook.

Summary: Testing ChatGPT v Google Bard
Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

In my testing, ChatGPT did not distinguish between the qualifiers WITH
SOURCES, and WITH FOOTNOTES, but we were pleased that Google Bard
provided more complete citations, complete with publisher, publication
date, and translator name when we requested an essay WITH
FOOTNOTES. As far as the quality of the essays, both ChatGPT and Google
Bard generated generally boring essays that resembled what you could
expect from a procrastinating lazy high school student. We did not spot
any obvious errors in the first two simple topics, although some of the
responses were terse and vague. The quality and content of the Google
Bard essays were somewhat better. Surprisingly, the summary and
detailed essays were not that different.

As can be expected, these chatbots performed best on simple essays that might be
assigned to high school students. But on the difficult question regarding Dementia
and Genetics and Epigenetics, both Chatbots choked. What was odd about both of
them was that when I requested WITH SOURCES/FOOTNOTES, both of the answers
dramatically changed! But interestingly, ChatGPT returned more interesting sources
on the more challenging topic. So, in the future, these chatbots may be about even
in capabilities. But I don’t know enough about the topic yet to judge whether there
were errors in the dementia essays.
To summarize, both ChatGPT and Google Bard performed best on simpler essays
where they may be outclassed by the articles in Wikipedia. But for the more
specialized topics, they fared much worse. But they can both be used to unearth
more sources and to double-check the rough draft of your research. The accountant
and scholar in me is not impressed, but the programmer in me is really impressed
with this accomplishment. But I am skeptical about the usefulness of the end

If I were a high school student, would I use ChatGPT or Bard after I wrote the first
draft of my essay? Certainly, many unimaginative teachers expect the rote
responses that might come out of a chatbot essay, so I could add them in to make
the essay more boringly acceptable. Personally, I would just use the Google Bard
chatbot with the WITH FOOTNOTES keywords to find additional sources to consult,
and to double-check my conclusions, knowing that the chatbot answer may not be
correct, as it is always subject to GIGO, or garbage-in, garbage-out.
Was ChatGPT or Bard plagiarizing its answers? Since they are basically recombining
existing patterns, in a deep sense that is all they can do. But I did take some key
sentences and ask Dr Google to find them, and he could not, so these chatbots do
not copy, at least not in the spot checking I performed. But I am not sure that
adding the phrases WITH SOURCES or WITH FOOTNOTES prompts the chatbots to
truly reveal all their sources.

Recently (11/2023) a story popped up on the CNN YouTube
channel titled: How Microsoft’s AI is messing up the news.
The very stable geniuses at Microsoft decided to fire the
editors who selected the stories that would be featured on
their www.msn.com website, replacing them with stupid
AI algorithms. As a result, now there are now many fringe
wacko news stories that clog up the front page, and they
turned off the AI feature that was generating insensitive
polling questions for disasters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGHqz-BJz84

LinkedIn asked if I wanted to
respond to this question:
“How to add human advice?
There are different ways to add
human advice to robo-advisors,
depending on your budget,
resources, and target market,”
followed by some managerial
technobabble.

My response was: “The question is misstated.
It should be reframed as: How do you add
robo-advice to human advice?
If you have small accounts, have a few dozen
or more canned responses written by real
human beings, and use artificially intelligent
tools to make a guess as to which one applies
best to the situation. And have humans
monitor at least the first few months of
requests and the robo-choices and refine the
logic and add relevant answers. I would never
allow the robot to coin advice on the fly, you
just cannot predict what sort of garbage the
robot will generate on occasion.”

AI Will Never Replace Attorneys & Others
How could AI ever replace Perry
Mason, and Della, his secretary?

On the YouTube channel, LegalEagle, an attorney tells us an absolutely hilarious story
of an attorney who foolishly used ChatGPT to write a legal opinion. They were doubly
foolish: they did not check the logic of the generated legal opinion. Generic chatbots
do not have a comprehensive database of legal cases to draw from, so the robot
literally manufactured the case law, providing fake case citations! The judge was not
pleased, quite likely the lawyers were heavily fined, on top of their profound
embarrassment.
If legal publication houses like CCH and Prentice Hall ever offer a product that has a
unique implementation using a chatbot engine, you may wish to experiment with it
and evaluate it, but ALWAYS remember, these are only pattern matching and pattern
replication programs!
Also, Google Scholar has an option to provide case law citations for federal court and
also state courts, I do not know if they support all states. This is a far safer artificial
intelligence tool to use since it is not a black box that does not reveal its sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpq3hRt0pmw&t=205s

Neither Will AI Replace Hamburger Flippers

Another recent Atlantic article discusses the current
impracticality of robots replacing minimum wage food
preparers at fast food restaurants. This reminds me of
articles on robots I read decades ago in Scientific American
where robots were just not able to butter bread, a task
that requires incredibly sensitive sensors to duplicate a
task most adults can do with ease, though perhaps not
very young children. That was thirty years ago, perhaps
robots can butter bread now, though I am skeptical.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/chipotle-fast-food-preparation-robots/675559/

Will AI Terminators Take Over the World?
A Foreign Affairs article on the use of
artificial intelligence in national
security applications warns that the
risks are profound. “Artificial
Intelligence models could, for example,
misidentify people or objects as
targets, resulting in unintended death
and destruction during conflict. Black
box AI models, whose reasoning
cannot be adequately understood or
explained, might lead military planners
to make hazardous decisions.”

But there is no
need to fear,
because “the
Pentagon has
also forbidden
the use of AI in
its nuclear
command and
control systems,
and it has urged
other nuclear
powers to do the
same.”

What this implies is that the fear of the
Terminator movies that our internet-based
computer systems will become self-aware,
deciding to destroy mankind, is misplaced.
Instead, a zero-comprehension artificially
intelligent program could destroy us all without
even realizing what it is doing!

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ai-already-war-flournoy

Should there even be a nuclear button? Historically, there
have been several false positives on both the Russian and
American sides where the computer system threw up a
false alarm that there was a massive nuclear attack
underway, which the operators, fortunately, ignored, as
otherwise we might not be reading this essay. Even today,
there is likely a far more likely possibility of a false alarm
than a massive incoming nuclear attack. Maybe we should
just rely on our nuclear submarines to counterattack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Stanley Kubrick's 1964
film, Dr. Strangelove, sitting at the console of an IBM 7090 computer.

Which is Better, AI Chatbots, or Wikipedia?

IMHO, there is no contest, Dr Wikipedia and Dr Google together are far
more accurate and far more useful than ChatGPT or Google Bard. Even if
your teacher doesn’t want you to consult Dr Wikipedia, you can benefit
from consulting with him on the sly. If you read my blogs, which have
footnotes, you will discover I use Wikipedia often. I don’t like to use
Wikipedia as a primary source, but on occasion, I will for unusual or
quirky topics.
How can you use Wikipedia? If you are a student, your teacher may be
rabid about your ignoring Wikipedia. But even if that is true, you can still
use Wikipedia to double-check facts you think you already know but want
to double-check them. Often when I do this, I will include a footnote
referencing the Wikipedia article, even for the most basic factoids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Sometimes I use Wikipedia to find sources for use for my
research. I did this for my videos on how Christians survived
under the fascist regimes of Europe before and during World War
II. Often Wikipedia itself will directly quote a source, you could
copy the quote and the reference.
Wikipedia can also tell you whether someone is culturally
relevant. For example, in my historical Jesus video, there was a
seminar where professors voted with color beads as to which
biblical Jesus quotes were actually said by Jesus. The leading
scholar did not have an entry in Wikipedia, which means he is
mostly forgotten today.

https://youtu.be/yYpNrhpmsYw
https://youtu.be/QP9UR8fqfvs
https://youtu.be/LvNynEdZFuM
https://youtu.be/ozEioe6yyY8

Some controversial topics such as abortion and LGBTQ issues can
have their Wikipedia pages dominated by activists, and relying on
their Wikipedia pages can be problematic. Likewise, the AI
chatbots may be digesting a lot of conspiracy theory or junk
articles on controversial topics, contaminating their GIGO output.
My doctor has confirmed that the Wikipedia articles on medical
topics are surprisingly accurate, many of them evidently are
updated by medical students or doctors. The quality of
specialized technical articles put the chat bot essays to shame.
This is likely true for any technical or scientific topic.

Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

What are some of the questions we should ask ourselves about artificial
intelligence?
Why would I want to cede the joy of learning to a stupid black box that regurgitates
joyless essays? What would I learn if I did that? We should seek wisdom from
knowledge to improve ourselves. How can we improve ourselves if we don’t do the
work of educating ourselves? You should only use artificial intelligence to suggest
other sources, or to double-check your finished essays, but you only perpetuate
your ignorance if you permit a stupid robot to replace your thinking.
When a business provides valuable services for its customers and clients, should the
business fire employees to replace them with unthinking machines simply so it can
be more profitable? Does profitability trump service? Does solely concentrating on
profitability make the world a better place? Or do you want to stake the public
perception of your firm on a stupid robot incapable of true comprehension?

Should governmental agencies, and corporations providing
essential services, be required to have real live people, hopefully
from the community rather than night shift workers from India,
handling their customer service? YouTube pulls channels for just
a few community strikes, and often they flag false positives often
generated by bogus complaints by extremists. I know this from
experience. Why not require YouTube and the other media
companies to hire real live people you can reach by telephone to
respond to these issues? Should profits trump civic
responsibility? Should profits trump dedication to democracy?

In particular, should news aggregators like Microsoft
and Facebook be required to hire real people for the
important task of selecting news articles for
dissemination to the public? How can stupid robots
with zero comprehension ever do as good a job as a
real, live, intelligent human being?

Do we really want fully automated self-driving cars
negotiating heavy traffic? Pilots deactivate the
automatic pilot setting for takeoff and landing, what
makes cars, trucks, and buses so special? Why not
have the AI system ring an alarm to allow a driver to
take control in congested traffic, or when the
computer senses unusual conditions or an incoming
flood of sensory perceptions? Why not use AI sensors
to detect if drivers fall asleep, so they wake them up?

My background is in both accounting and programming. In my experience, most
programmers are unduly enthusiastic about automation, but there comes a point
where further automation hurts rather than helps. As an example, one of the
programs I wrote was automating the matching items, prices, and discounts of
vendor invoices to purchase order inventory lines, including reading EDI electronic
invoices. We were bought out by a large Fortune 500 company, and they were
aghast that we did not automatically match these invoices, and automatically pay
them. My response, speaking as an accountant rather than a programmer, was this:
What is wrong with having a real live human being scan a matching invoice for fifty
thousand dollars for five minutes before approving it?
Androids like Data on Star Trek, or the android boy in Steven Spielberg’s movie,
Artificial Intelligence, will never truly become intelligent, they can never be
emotional, they can be neither depressed nor elated. They can only mimic
intelligence and emotions through pattern matching and pattern replication.

There have been a spate of articles in the Atlantic
magazine, as well as the Foreign Affairs magazine,
on artificial intelligence, and I have always found
these magazines to be balanced in their views.

https://www.meetup.com/Reflections/

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