She said, “I don’t think you understand me”
I said, “Come on, ‘course I do”
She said, “No, I really don’t think so”
I said, “Well, then I guess I don’t”

From Dan Bern’s New American Language

The theme of this post shall (dubiously) be “failures to communicate”. The first failure under discussion is my own failure to update this “blaugh” of mine in over a week. This is probably a bigger issue for me than it is for you, my dear readers, because I like to use this thing to “keep my skills sharp”, as it were. Trying to write something coherent every couple of days is good practice.

In my own defense, I’ve been preoccupied lately, in part by certain other non-clear communications. But that’s a story for another time (see the above Dan Bern for the general flavor).

Another failure to communicate on my part is that I didn’t tell you up front the origin of my title for this entry: the line was uttered by someone more creative than I, one memorable night at SUSHI a few years back.

At this point, I’m going to broaden my theme to “failures” and “communication”.

I think the editors of Skeptic Magaznie had me in mind when they put together the most recent issue. I don’t normally buy it (it’s not cheap! 9 bucks after tax) but I saw this one and really couldn’t resist. Cover story: “AI Gone Awry: The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligene”. Major theme of the issue: creationism/intelligent design. They’ve got an article by Richard Dawkins, some analysis of the “Dover Panda Trial”, and even an article that mentions my man Ken Ham.

From the last, a report from a Creationism Conference by Jason Rosenhouse:

When [speaker] Gitt finished, the audience erupted into an enthusiastic applause, followed by a standing ovation. Ken Ham took the stage and boasted that [Gitt's presentation] was one of the most powerful apologetic arguments he ahd ever heard. This was an especially revealing moment. It is a simple fact that Gitt’s argument made no sense at all. Consequently there is no way anyone in the audience could have understood a word he was saying.

The AI article, by Peter Kassan, basically argues that current attempts to build anything like human-level intelligence are doomed to failure, since we don’t understand that which we’re trying to replicate. I won’t take you through the arguments, but will give you this choice quote on the subject of the current fad of emergence of intelligence from systems of simple components:

The number of neruons in the insect brain is about 10,000 and in a human cerebrum 30,000,000,000. But if you put together 3,000,000 cockroaches (this seems to be the AI idea behind “swarms”), you get a large cockroach colony, not human-level intelligence.

I was also going to talk about the folly of trying to base AI on natural language or its cousin Predicate Logic, (get it! Failure! Of Communication!) but I ran out of steam, so I’ll save that topic for another time. Seems I’ve failed again. Anyhow, check out the Skeptic for the above and other gems.

And now, way off topic, (so my failure to stick with my “failure to communicate theme” is complete): I’ve lately rediscovered the The Ur-Quan Masters, an open-source port of the classic space adventure game Star Control 2. The beginning game is a little slow but if you grind it out you’ll be rewarded.

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