A cat is on a mat.

The AI Ladder says (page 5) that 81% of business leaders are confused about artificial intelligence.  Personally, it has been my observation that about 99.9% of not only business leaders, but also technical professionals and I am coming to find even including AI researchers are confused about the real capabilities and potential of AI.  What is my basis for reaching the conclusion that I have reached?  Well, about 20+ years of working to make XBRL-based reporting work and reading the book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do.  I also have some background in formal logic which does help.  I am no expert in AI, but I am really good at understand what does and does not work and testing. While I am no AI expert, I am very qualitied to ask really good questions.

Hype, hype, hype.  For example, Elon Musk has promised full self driving cars since 2015.  So how is that going?  I really like Elon and what Elon and Tesla and SpaceX are doing.  But come on.  I learned early in my accounting career to never trust a software vendor.  You certainly don't want to trust any AI software vendor right now.  You need to test and verify what these people claim.  And most business leaders have no clue how to test and verify claims of AI software vendors. Most AI is little better than cheap parlor tricks.  This puts business leaders in a really risky position.

I am not quite done with reading The Myth of Artificial Intelligence yet.  I will lay out what I understand from that, and I am understanding a lot, later.  If you, like me, are tired of being bamboozled by snake oil salesmen; consider following my blog for the next two or three months.

For starters, to understand artificial intelligence, you need to understand the difference between "syntax" and "semantics".  That is not all you need to understand, but that is a start.

So, how do you communicate, "A cat is on a mat," such that a computer can understand what you are communicating?  Here are several different technical syntax alternatives (examples):

Which alternative do you like best?  Probably the one in the lower right hand corner, "A cat is on a mat."

After you have articulated the information in a technical syntax, you still have to break down the semantics (the meaning) of what is carried within that technical syntax. My blog post, Logic Programming and Theories, points out different approaches for articulating the semantics or the meaning conveyed within that technical syntax.  That meaning needs to be understandable to machines so that they can perform work and also understandable to humans so that they can check to be sure the meaning conveyed is correct.

There are exactly three ways to get the meaning conveyed by some technical syntax into a form that a computer based process can effectively understand:
  1. Humans put the meaning they want to convey into some machine-readable form.
  2. Machines read the technical syntax and convert that technical syntax into machine understandable meaning.
  3. Humans and machines work together to get the meaning into a form that is understandable by machines.
Each of the three approaches has a basket of PROS and a basket of CONS.  To avoid building a fragile house of cards that will come crashing down on you, you need to have a clear understanding of those PROS and CONS. Business leaders need to peel away all of the hype and hyperbole.

Understand the above; I will keep going in the next installment.

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