A story here about the IBM artificial intelligence program called: Watson
Jeff Jonas, who I have been following for years and admire his thinking. He talks about Watson indirectly here.
He expresses in one beautiful line the nature of his entire amazing professional career:
"Context is looking at the things around some thing to understand the thing."
I love it! It is all about the thing!
That one statement is why he is a Chief Scientist at IBM. I previously made blog entries about him here and here and here.
He is a super intelligent guy with a moral conscience. One of the things I admire about him is the ability to describe the complexity of structural relationships simply. Simply because he starts with a foundational building block like his statement about context. Then he discovers context around it. He can also start with that foundational building blog and create new context around it. The new context is a management structure to use what is discovered. That is the story about is first contextual discovery system in Las Vegas.
In the process of discovering context around a thing I believe Jeff is the kind of thinker that will say that the established management plan structure that addresses whatever happens to be the problem domain of the thing that is understood by looking at the things around it is an inadequate or dysfunctional plan.
I wish I could talk to Jeff about this monetary system thing!
Here is a summary of a story I told in grade school in the 50's:
There came a time far into the future when the most powerful computer ever made was asked the ultimate question: (it was a Catholic grade school) What is the solution to the problems of mankind? The computer began to reply with the words of the First Commandment. The nun did not quite know what to say except; next.
We are not at that point yet! However, it is not the computer that gives us answers it is the conceptual structure of complex relationships built with our natural and artificial languages that reveal to us what is our own logic that created the system.
The Logic that creates our systems can be revealed to us by a logically constructed machine looking at our conceptual structures created not by machines but by our brains and reveal our logic to us as either being true or false logic. False in this context being logic that is inconsistent with the system it knows as the relationships among all real and conceptual things.
Watson is that system taking baby steps. It is not that we will be the told what to do by machines but that conceptual tools we create will serve us to present to us our social self solutions to contextual problems. For example: Environment, Health Care, Politics, Money, etc.
Watson is simply a step beyond writing everything down in our natural language called English in order to organize and manage context with an exquisitely accurate contextual object oriented machine language to do the same thing for us but better.
Context reveals answers! It might tell us we got the contextual relationships wrong, especially in our social structures but we did the best we could because we were working with a best logic and natural language we previously had to work with.
We really do not need a computer language to reveal the truth in our social structures today and the possible corrections and changes. We do need a more accurate natural language approaching seamless integration with our artificial languages. A feedback loop that takes us from natural language through iterations of machine languages to relate to conceptual structure models then backtracking through the process to natural language explanations.
We do not need to learn a new artificial language to interface with artificial intelligence. We only have to learn our own natural language structures better to improve communication and reduce noise.
The better structure we need to communicate is building itself right under (in front of) our noses. It is the web structure of the internet. The same place that Watson goes to find all the contextual relationships, the same place the NSA goes to find them. Where we go when we search for anything to add to or connect with the conceptual structures in our heads.
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