Daily Archives: June 18, 2019

AI: Applied Indirection

You read that right. AI at most companies is not Artificial Intelligence. It’s not Autonomous Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence, Assisted Intelligence, or even Amplified Intuition. In reality, it is marketers taking Green Day’s AI a little to literally (and treating everyone like an American Idiot*) and repackaging old tech with a new label.

You see, most of what the Marketing Mad Men are trying to sell as AI are just old-school statistical algorithms in a brand-new wrapper. And the only reason these technologies are finally hitting the market and getting good results is the sheer amount of processing power and data we have at our disposal — because dumb algorithms (which is what they are) only work well when you have a lot of processing power, a lot more data, and the power plant to run that processing power 24/7 at 99% capacity across dozens, if not hundreds, of trial parameterizations until you find something that, well, just works.

But it’s not intelligence. It’s advanced curve fitting, regression, k-means clustering, support vector machines, and other statistical inference techniques that existed in SAS in the 1990s. Except now, the curve fitting is nth degree polynomial, advanced trigonometric, geometric, n-dimensional, step-wise, and adaptive. The regression is nonlinear, non-parametric, stepwise, and much more robust … and accurate because you can process millions of data points if you have them. The k-means is not clustering around one or two dimensions, but one or two dozen if necessary in a large multi-dimensional space — and the clusters can be of arbitrary n-dimensional geometric shapes using kernal machines. The support vector machines are not just based on primal, dual, and kernal classification with a bit of gradient descent but enhanced with multi-class support vectors, advanced regression, and transduction (to work with partial valued data). And so on.

And don’t think there’s anything new about “deep neural networks” either. They are just multi-level neural networks which were common-place in the 1990s with more levels and more nodes per level with more advanced statistical classification functions in each node trying to figure out how to extract patterns from unclassified data to classify and structure it, which happen to get better results because they can work on millions of data points, instead of thousands, and do tens of millions of calculations and re-calculations instead of tens of thousands. And that’s the only reason they get better results “out of the box”. There is absolutely nothing better or more advanced about the core technology. Nothing. It’s still as dumb as a door-knob, no matter how whizz-bang the markets make it out to be.

And at the end of the day, the “active” part of the neural network is a fraction of the overall network (which means as much as 90% of the computation is wasted), and if that can be identified and abstracted, you typically end up with a small neural network no bigger than the ones being used twenty years ago, which, even if more than three or four layers, can probably be redesigned as a three-or-four layer network. (See the recent article on the recent MIT Research, for example.) [But if you’ve studied advanced mathematical systems, this is not an unexpected results. Over-dumbification has always led to unnecessary processing and inferior results. Of course, over-smartification also leads to ineffective algorithms because data, typically produced by humans, is not perfect either and we need to account for this as well and detect small perturbations and deal with them. But it’s always better to be thoughtful in our design than to just brute force it.

In other words, many modern marketing madmen in enterprise software have become the new snake-oil salesmen, often selling simple statistical packages for a million dollars or raising tens of millions for yesterday’s tech in a shiny new wrapper. But it’s not intelligent, or even intuitive, by any stretch of the imagination.

That’s not to say that there isn’t technology that can qualify as assisted technology (and maybe even augmented in special cases), just that the majority of what’s being pushed your way isn’t.

So how do you know if you are among the majority being subjected to Applied Indirection or one of the few minority being offered a solution with true Assisted Intelligence capabilities? Stay tuned as we discuss this topic more in depth in the weeks to come …

* It’s much preferable to be a Canadian Idiot. We’re nicer and the “AI” marketers don’t bother us as much.