applied Intelligence — Empowering Strategy For Human Progress
Perry C. Douglas August 6, 2024
With the assent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) — 18 months ago when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, kicking off an AI arms race, with tech giants making promises about how the technology will revolutionize the world. But after billions upon billions spent, a hype game of epic proportion, all that we’ve been left with are irritating, jabbering chatbots in an infinite loop of hallucinations.
We are also seeing a massive environmental impact, measured in terms of electricity usage, emissions and water usage; as Bloomberg recently put it: “AI is already wreaking havoc on global power systems.” This is, of course, fueled by the fallacy believe that more and more data will make these systems better and that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is “just around the corner.” But that corner is not even in sight.
The majority of AI companies popping up are following the likes of OpenAI ChatGPT/LLMs; hyping up and chasing the same thing with the same narratives but with slightly different twists. Larger and larger language models — bigger is better but what we are seeing is a stifling of innovation and competition.
Companies like Anthropic and Perplexity AI and all the other acolyte companies and start-ups are prime examples of everyone building the same business model. Many are breaking copyright laws, not entering into proper licensing agreements, giving proper compensation, or recognizing the many content creators they effectively lift content from.
However, the chickens are beginning to come home to roost. Heavyweights like the New York Times are now suing OpenAI for billions related to unauthorized use of its content. And there are a growing amount of lawsuits piling up so we’ll know soon enough how viable these GenAI companies really are.
GenAI has been seriously flawed from the get-go, with deep problems in its “machine learning” systems, its neural network fantasy theories, and basic reasoning and abstraction. This has led to incurable system hallucinations, making GenAI unreliable and increasingly unsafe. As it stands now, with no reasonable evidence that anything will change in how GenAI is utilized. The reality is that GenAI doesn’t work well enough to be a serious long-term sustainable solution for people and organizations, and it’s likely another bubble.
— Gary Marcus
Fooling Us Softly
The deep technical issues plaguing large language models (LLMs), the core technology in Gen-AI is a “black box” that not even those writing the code know how it works. Since ChatGPT’s launch in the fall of 2022, hallucinations and making stupid errors still plague it, and GPT 1, 2, 3, 4…25…whatever…won’t fix it.
GenAI works essentially by fooling people by giving the appearance of intelligence — of being a natural language interpreter. But its statistical techniques are based on an “impossible language” according to the father of modern linguistics and former MIT Professor, Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky says these LLM systems can “learn” only through their own impossible language machine-creation world. This is still not equivalent to real human-based natural language relative to how humans think, learn and acquire knowledge in the physical world. So AI is just giving us the illusion of intelligence that it can truly interpret human language and provide accurate outputs based on its interpretation of meanings. Of course, Chomsky points out that this is impossible because the system can’t distinguish between the actual world and the computer world.
AI isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know he says, it’s just telling us what it’s being fed, so there is no intelligence occurring with GenAI, just programming. So don’t be fooled by phenomena, things that seem amazing, nor fall for nice stories fed by big tech. GenAI is impressive for sure but if we are paying attention we’ll realize that it’s just an advanced search engine with cool features.
“I think that it’s important to remember that LLMs are next-word prediction tools trained to be conversational by imitating human responses. You don’t get much different information from an LLM than you do from a standard search engine.”
— Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun
The play taking place, therefore, by big tech is to continue to push the ball down the road, irrespective of LLMs working well for consumers or not. Big tech continues to recalibrate narratives to hold people into the story about AGI. All of this is for the singular purpose of using hype and deception to expand their businesses and profits and maintain control of advancing technologies and us.
Therefore, there must be a change in thinking, about the best use of technology to serve human progress. GenAI hasn’t been utilized properly as an automation-based technology for human progress. Therefore, the applied intelligence (ai) approach toward the utilization of GenAI is human-centric. A world where technology serves as an augmenting force to empower strategy for human progress.
A New Paradigm
Successfully navigating any new or fast-moving technology environment requires getting up to speed quickly. Insightful alignment in thinking intrinsic to seeking the objective truth (OT) must be the first principle of strategy development. The OT is the only true truth; which is central to building reliable and robust fact-based strategies to lead innovation and transformation.
For that reason, applied intelligence (ai) has been developed as a countervailing force against the significant exaggerations surrounding GenAI. Therefore, ai seeks to augment human knowledge acquisition, creativity, innovation and ingenuity, through a systematic methodology process resting firmly on the proven foundations of science and wisdom: philosophy and mathematics, the basis of ai.
A philosophy and mathematics foundation provides a disciplined thinking framework, the scientific method to build on. So ai uses this sturdy foundation to effectively utilize GenAI technology more purposefully, combining it with human experiences to solve complex 21st-century business and social problems.
Effectively, ai is a decisioning tool predicated on the practical foundation of how humans think and make decisions, with informal and formal logic, which is essentially philosophy and mathematics — the science of wisdom. Understanding the limitations of technology/AI ensures that a lot of precious time and money isn’t wasted with nonsense like AGI, and so, ai doesn’t get distracted in pursuing making AI competitive, surpassing or replacing human intelligence.
Instead, ai takes an augmenting approach where human intelligence is at the centre of the universe and ai serves to amplify the learning progress, by using GenAI’s narrow intelligence functionality practically, purposefully and responsibly, enhancing human capacity, capabilities, and ingenuity.
So when it comes to making strategy decisions, ai does so by a process of logic! Logic works differently in both philosophy and mathematics or informal and formal deduction but both, however, function independently of each other but act together to form our cognitive intelligence.
Logic, therefore, is intrinsic to applied intelligence — a systematic form of deductive reasoning based on a disciplined framework model where knowledge can be applied objectively to real-world problems.
Nevertheless, to get a true understanding of authentic human intelligence, we must dive deeper into the “informal and formal” methods of reasoning. And to do so, we must go back many centuries to the scientific wisdom of Immanuel Kant. Kant provides us with the most comprehensive, straightforward and scientific explanation of authentic human intelligence. Kant’s thinking laid the foundation for modern cognitive science and epistemology…the study of nature, origins, and the limits of human knowledge; ergo, the limits of AI technology.
By focusing on how humans think, see, understand and interact with the universe, ai’s disciplined thinking methodology effectively protects our intellect from the ravages of ignorance. Or getting fooled by illusions and sophisticated narratives told to us by the big tech aristocracy.
Rationality and empirical knowledge both are applied through the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, which Aristotle first defined over 2000 years ago. Aristotle’s explanation of how rationality and intelligence flow from the senses, forms the basis of cognitive intelligence that philosophers and mathematicians like Kant have expanded on over the many centuries. Aristotle and Kant are even more relevant and necessary today than ever before, because of all the AI charlatans running around.
Accordingly, ai serves to broadly and practically augment human intelligence in the selected domain of our users. To get to a higher dimensional level of thinking and ingenuity to extract useful insights that can be used for crafting winning strategies. Making applied intelligence | ai the most commonsense and reliable model available, to drive human creativity, innovation, and strategy development in the 21st-century’s new economy.
In general structure, ai has been developed on Kant’s model of the mind, with the independence of Empiricism and Rationalism, which he effectively unifies to define the authentic nature of our intelligence.
Empiricism says that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience, and the rationalizing side says that humans naturally have “a priori” knowledge before they know anything else. In other words, we don’t need to reference experience to understand that day represents light, and that night is dark. Nothing has to be proven because we already know this to be true a priori.
And ai also takes from the wisdom of philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes who famously declared that “I think; therefore I am,” effectively confirming one’s conscious intelligence in the physical world. Descartes also emphasized the critical human ability of “double-checking,” as a way to confirm one’s understanding of the universe and their intelligent decisions.
Being able to “double-check” our deductions through the modality of the five senses serves to continuously reconfirm one’s own intelligent decisions. Double-checking can also be easily done through one’s own empirical experiences, by referencing a known source of fact, or by simply asking another reasonable person. AI, on the other hand, can’t do any of that…so it just hallucinates instead.
Real-world logical decision-making is often neither clear nor simple, so ai offers a framework for clarity and a process to build strategies confidently, with the scientific method.
However, we are not saying to abandon GenAI, just to be intellectually honest about its capabilities and select the parts of it that can be useful to us. So AI alone or the fallacy of AGI is a colossal waste of time — another Wall Street bubble. However, by using the technology in a more focused, purposeful and applied way, as a tool in augmenting human intelligence, GenAI can contribute meaningfully to human progress.
The 6ai Software Solution
6ai Technologies is the software for applied intelligence. An easy-to-use, do-it-yourself solution that doesn’t require any special training or skills, and at a fraction of the cost of hiring expensive consultants or advisors, who are just telling you what you already know.
By coupling data science and advanced techniques with 6ai’s focused language model templates (FLM-T), the software engages you in the process of logic and discovery to generate fact-based insights. Our mission, therefore, is to turn insight into strategy, empowering anyone to design anywhere from multi-billion-dollar corporate strategies to personal growth strategies.
The goal of the software is to identify the whitespaces of market opportunity, so one can build effective strategies and take advantage of what has been discovered.
Both Kant’s and Descartes’s work help us to be intelligent about our intelligence, and not to outsmart ourselves, but to be well informed and have the augmenting technology tools to help us win!
Without experiences we’ll have no real understanding of things, and any concept without perception remains abstract. So AI has syntax, the arrangement of words for the formation of sentences that can give the impression of intelligence. But AI doesn’t know its meaning, and without meaning there can be no true understanding. Without understanding there is a strategy-gap — applied intelligence endeavours to fill that gap.
The raison d’être for applied intelligence | ai, is to provide a dynamic and robust working framework that applies scientific methods to build fact-based strategy solutions to solve complex, real-world, business and social problems. 6ai software’s objective is to develop customized, easy-to-use, purposeful and highly relevant 21st-century strategies that harness advanced analytics, data, generative artificial intelligence, and scientific wisdom as necessary.
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