Voodoo Neuronics
NEURAL NETS MAKE CHICAGO BLUES SEE RED
The Chicago police force is using an artificial intelligence program to anticipate misconduct among its officers. Read the full article written by Edward Helmore
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/neural-nets-make-chicago-blues-see-red-1327853.html



In this post the dialogue is realised by an interaction of virtual characters, for more information please check the page “Virtual characters“

Sam
The approach to discover the rules of all thinking and putting them in a computer failed by and large, instead programmers started looking more in detail at how human brains worked

Manuel
Sure, that makes a lot of sense!

Sam
In the beginning they simply modeled neurons as input-output machines, firing and not firing as ones and zeroes

Manuel
That’s … simplistic? Right?

Sam
A bit, but again it did have serious early successes. A computational model of a single neuron was quite useful

Sam
An artificial neuron simulated in a computer could actually already solve a lot of problems, even though quite simple ones

Manuel
So how did that work?

Sam
Well it would have a series of inputs, filter them by recognizing a pattern, and then provide as output whether the input belonged to a certain category of not

Manuel
Not sure I get this … 😞😞

Manuel
Ah, ok. So it can tell whether they are above or below some threshold

Sam
Exactly! Now that is indeed still quite simple, but now imagine combining a lot of those together …. ☺️☺️

Manuel
Oh, wow, of course! So you can draw a lot of lines! Meaning finding a lot of patterns?

Sam
Yep, very complex pattern detection, but …

Manuel
… it sounded too good to be true, right? 😀

Sam
Oh, no! Not at all! It is just that if you string together artificial neurons in a network, it becomes pretty hard to tell how it works exactly

Manuel
Huh? You build a thing and don’t know how it works?

Sam
That was a big criticism. But if you think about it, it seems obvious: we don’t yet fully understand how brains work, so we build an artificial brain …

Manuel
… ok, but how can you build an artificial brain if you don’t know how it works?

Sam
Well, we use the very simple artificial neuron model, which we do understand, and string a lot of them together. But you can’t program that like an ordinary computer

Manuel
So how do you do that then?

Sam
We make it learn. We don’t have a general rule for solving all problems, but we have a general rule for learning how to solve problems

Sam
The information, the knowledge how to solve a problem, is all distributed through the network.

Sam
There is no step-by-step algorithm 🙄

Manuel
OK, so it works in a very different way from the earlier approach where we tried to find a universal recipe

Sam
Right. The problem now is that we can’t always explain what it is doing or how it works

Manuel
… so it is just like the brain … 🧠

Sam
Ha! That’s right! The model is as mysterious as the thing itself

Manuel
So when we talk about AI nowadays, is it all neural networks?

Sam
Mostly yes. Things like Machine Learning work with this approach. We train a neural network to recognize patterns in a large dataset. And then do something “intelligent” with it

Manuel
So is AGI more realistic with this newer approach?

Sam
No, not really.

Manuel
… oh come on! … 😆
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