Mankind is not a simple feature vector

I’m not going to talk about politics, but I do want to talk about this article I found on one of my many feeds. I will summarize this extremely briefly. This guy was so baffled by the election outcome and the poor pollster statistics and generally how this wasn’t predicted with machine learning and the sort.

Anyone who knows me, knows that i hate the term “Artificial Intelligence” I remember some expert in the industry who closer compared it to “slightly less dumb”. I have written a number of other articles expressing how we are very far away from anything that is truly intelligent, by much any definition. Tools Ike Watson and DeepMind are impressive highly refined tools that have been fed incredibly large data sets so that it could either be trained or train itself.

It is not at all a surprise that predictions were so far off. When dealing with decision making in general most people choose choice A because they align themselves with many of the principles, philosophies, and ideas. That is at least what we wish people did. The reality is the things that are not about the “issues” are a great deal more important than people may think. People are not Vulcans; they are not making every action or even most of the actions that they perform weighing in all of the possible outcomes and the long term versus the short term benefits.

People are emotional and erratic creatures. People are bigots, racists, or so open minded that they have no actual opinions. We live in a world where people must be politically correct and are shunned for deviation. Money and power go hand in hand provide ample leverage to many scenarios. Corruption is not Republican or Democratic phenomenon, it is a part of humanity. Our nation and its capitalistic mindset is one of the greatest things that make us a unique and great nation. Regulation from monopolies is a way to limit that the gross power a company may posses should only reach so far.

The power of leverage from a huge conglomerate had over the government is tremendous. A true system or checks and balances that provides independence to the capitalistic nature of commerce as well as the freedom for a nation to govern itself is not any easy task in any way. It seems evident that in our over 240 years it is still far from perfect.

What we need to realize is a machine model, and statistics that are collected only account for the features and dimensoins that were taken into account. The nuances of what a single person wants let alone a nation of millions of them is simply impossible without first grasping the human factor. The incredible thing that define each and every person who lives on this planet.

I hope that our understanding of ourselves as well as our capacity to teach our machine models improves so that we can better harness and sustain the wonderful qualities of mankind.