> On Nov 13, 2022, at 9:09 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> [EXTERNAL EMAIL]
>
>
>
>> On Nov 12, 2022, at 1:08 PM, Anders Nelson via cctalk
>> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> I bet NN/AI would be helpful with data recovery - if we can model certain
>> common failure modes with those old drive heads we could infer what the
>> data should have been...
>
> NN maybe, I need to understand those better. I see they are now a building
> block for OCR.
>
> AI, not so clear. In my view, AI is a catch-all term for "software whose
> properties are unknown and probably unknowable". A computer, including one
> that executes AI softwware, is a math processing engine, so in principle its
> behavior is fully defined by its design and by the software in it. But when
> you do AI in which "learning" is part of the scheme, the resulting behavior
> is in fact unknown and undefined.
>
> For some applications that may be ok. OCR doesn't suffer materially from
> occasional random errors, since it has errors anyway from the nature of its
> input. But, for example, I shudder at the notion of AI in safety-critical
> applications (like autopilots for aircraft, or worse yet for cars). A safety
> critical application implemented in a manner that precludes the existence of
> a specification is a fundanmentally insane notion.
>
> paul
>
Paul,
not a fan of AI myself. But, I feel constrained to point out that the
alterative to "AI in safety-critical applications” often is “a minimum-wage
employee in a safety-critical application” which may or may not be an
improvement. Agreed that AI is fundamentally not absolutely predictable - but
neither are people. For problems complex enough to require either in a
safety-critical decision-making loop, it may resolve down to a question of
either 1) trusting the statistics (AI driving is maybe already *statistically*
safer than human driving), 2) desiging the whole system in such a manner as to
be tolerant of decision-making faults, or 3) Not doing the dangerous activity
because it’s not monitorable.
I would say our current road and automobile system doesn’t satisfy any
of those criteria, FWIW.
For problems simple enough to write closed-form, formally-verifiable
software to handle, I *definitely* agree that is the way to go.
- Mark
