Artificial intelligence is a lot like communism: Ask ten machine learning experts to define it and they’ll come up with one hundred different definitions… and none of them will work as advertised.
Just as the printing press mass produced text information, neural networks mass produce correlation. They find correlations that are
too trivial for humans to bother pointing out and correlations which
are too complicated to make sense of. Typically, the total human capacity for correlation detection is mostly constrained by education options, investment access, geopolitical competition, academic gatekeeping, and regulation from authorities. With neural networks operating like a printing press to mass produce correlation, the statement “
quantity is it’s own quantity” will create an epistemic “
shift of scale”.
Part 1 of Cognitive Asymmetry will explore how the printing press, the Industrial age, and the Internet created structurally similar “shifts of scale”. This will help us understand better what unknown events may arise from mass produced correlation.