“The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” George Orwell in his book 1984
When I read this, the first thought that occurred to me was Bayesian statistics and I’ll try my best to explain why. Our minds make decisions based on experiences every minute of the day- when we don’t see a walk signal at a traffic light we stop for until the bright white walk signal appears, now if a forager who walked the earth three thousand years ago were to somehow encounter such a walk signal, what do you think he’s going to do?… Our prior experiences make a world of difference, they heavily influence how we predict, anticipate and react to things. This very idea of using prior information (Probability of A given B or P(A/B)) is at the heart of Bayesian statistics, to stretch that a little further- this very idea will help computers make decisions much like us, based on experiences, the only catch though is that unlike us computers don’t really have to experience something to gain experiences, which makes their learning curve steeper and shorter.
Given enough time we all have the ability to make good judgements and decisions, but seldom do we get enough time. The dictionary meaning of impulsive is “acting or done without forethought” but the biological reason why impulsive actions manifest is more to do with our mind’s caching (short term memory + hardened habits).
We act impulsive because we or the environment around us imposes a time constraint on the action (50% off on all designer suits until 5pm today!), which makes us depend on our cached memory and not on our actual, all-wise set of experiences that sit deep in our memory. Take this for instance- If you had encountered and reacted to a particular situation two days ago, the chances that you will be in a much better position to handle or react to a similar time bound situation today are higher. However, if you were to encounter the same situation 10 years from now, your prior experience (P(A/B)) will not be readily available in your mind’s cache to enable you to react or handle the time bound situation with the same adeptness. Reason being your mind follows the least recently used principle to clear the cache, said differently your decisions are influenced most by your most recent experiences.
Well, of course this is an oversimplification, but I hope I’ve made the point- prior experience makes a world of difference, but prior experience fades with time. Computers face the same challenge too, however their information retrieval systems operate in microseconds, whereas we take minutes if not hours.
The human input output fallacy. When was the last time you met a friend who you hadn’t seen in more than 5 years? What did you two talk about? Was it about your average experiences? Or Was it about experiences that were outliers- the one time you swam alongside great white sharks or jumped out of an Airplane. Humans for some unknown reason communicate the edges of the experiences curve and never really talk about the average, daily, commonplace experiences. Scale that thought and you know why NEWS and social media constantly feeds you with the most upsetting or the absolute best, because they are the edges. There’s a rule in Bayesian statistics that ensures robustness- to make accurate predictions make sure your priors are unadulterated, in other words if we let NEWS or social media dictate or corrupt our prior experiences, our decisions and reactions will be a reflection of the extreme.
This explains how governments instill fear from or hatred towards other nations and everyone who lives there, as most of us haven’t had personal interactions with common people from those nations so when we see them for the first time we make judgements based on these priors that’s fed by the news. Remember- our experiences are average, our decisions are average and our outputs are average, and so is everyone else’s. If some day in the future there were to be this computer that can accomplish everything a human mind can, I hope they can fix this human bug, else the computer will make extreme decisions based on extreme priors, possibly leading to unimaginable outcomes.
There are three things that are stopping the computer from being on par with you: a) Ability to expend massive computing resources (Quantum computing will solve this), b) Sophisticated decision making frameworks (more and more complex algorithms will solve this) and c) ability to process enormous amount of data (we all know will be solved).
With exponential advancements in these three areas, the day is not far when computers will have the ability to make complex and intricate decisions based on priors instantaneously.
On that day, we’ll witness enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden brains (as articulated by George Orwell) walk this Earth, and I hope they extend us and not negate us.
