About face
Doc Searls,
Oct 31, 2019
OK. No. I just can't go along with this. From Doc Searls: "The only entities that should be able to recognize people's faces are other people. And maybe their pets. But not machines." Why can't I go along with this? Because it's basically a call to end artificial intelligence. Let's go back to the beginning: Searls starts off with a compelling account from Polanyi's Personal Knowldge about his oft-cited definition of 'tacit knowledge'. Now two things are true. First, 'tacit' is the opposite of 'explicit', in the sense that the former is ineffible - that is, it can't be put into words. And second, tacit knowledge is like recognizing a person's face. Such knowledge is, in essence, connective knowledge - it's the sort of knowledge a neural network would have, both human and AI. That's why it's so hard to explain how an AI reaches the conclusions it does - the knowledge is tacit, formed by connections, not words. But Searl wants to ban this. Which - to me - makes no sense.
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