After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Bailey does an excellent job of combining computer theory with history, mathematics, economics and philosophy. I can only guess that the people who gave it a single star must have had difficulty with Bailey's style which, at times, requires a measure of diligence to locate the point.

Rating:
Summary: Before Thought: The Primacy of Human Intellect over Computer
Review: Bailey's ruminations bear rereading now that five years have passed since their first appearance. We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos.

This is not to say that Bailey's postulations have no merit. The advances of the computer age, particularly in the still-infant and arcane discipline of artificial intelligence, continue to fascinate us and to challenge us. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. I suspect that pattern, as old as civilization, will prevail.

The chapter in this book that most demands reflection-and rereading-is Chapter 17, where Henry David Thoreau is pitted against the myriad forces of the information age. As early as 1978 I was criticized by my literary colleagues for teaching the metaphysician of Walden Pond. At the time, I was working with Dr. Louis Uhle of USC on patterns of word usage in Renaissance English (primarily dramatic) texts as a scientific measure of authorship attribution. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them.

Another colleague from the life sciences took his students to the college lawns to look as if for the first time at the patterns of dandelion blossoms, evoking the kinds of questions that not much later spawned Chaos Theory. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.

Bailey's own accounts of elementary school children discerning the grounds for identifying a species that had remained unperceived by the "experts" reminds me of those halcyon days-before I also drifted into "line and circle" problem solving of the probabilistic kind. We had no idea we were participating in a revolution of thought, and perhaps that was just as well.

A metaphor Bailey uses in After Thought, particularly in Chapter 17, is that of understanding the behavior of rivers, and I think he was trying to suggest something about the elusive construct of Nature, which, if we should only drop our preconceptions and listen, would always surprise us. The Mississippi, like the Nile (or the Yangtze, for that matter), remains a keen scientific concern, but offers no easy understanding.

Yes, we have the potential to engage in collaborative enterprises involving computers and networks around the globe-the greatest parallel processing enterprise, in size and scale of any age. The question is, how much closer to essential truths this endeavor brings us?

Bailey would have us understand that we are about to transcend the time of maths as we know them and that we shall reach a new plateau of pattern recognition that renders the schema of ancient Babylon, the thinking of Kepler and even the cogitation of the Sante Fe Institute fellows obsolete. Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. The leaps of genius have outrun the numbers throughout history, however the scientific elite have formulated them. Our experts propose; Nature disposes otherwise. The human intellect itself has been found far more powerful than the sum of all the crunching power of all the machines in being or under consideration-working individually or working together.

Two cautions to Bailey's line of reasoning-for its determinism seems to partake of the confining features of Newton's laws, which he claims to eschew. First, no true scientist ever deceives himself or herself that absolutes are inviolate. Second, the very open inquiry at the root of the scientific method-even among the ancient Greeks-has never really surrendered to the rigors of numbers.

We fall between the pattern that has broken and the patterns that we sense as possible in Chaos every time. Taken that way, we can all still engage in our common task of understanding taking the fruits of our data looms as yet another set of features against which we try to move from apprehension to comprehension, the latter of which we approach as that dark and all-transforming glass of eternity.

Rating:
Summary: Before Thought: The Primacy of Human Intellect over Computer
Review: Bailey's ruminations bear rereading now that five years have passed since their first appearance. We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos.

This is not to say that Bailey's postulations have no merit. The advances of the computer age, particularly in the still-infant and arcane discipline of artificial intelligence, continue to fascinate us and to challenge us. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. I suspect that pattern, as old as civilization, will prevail.

The chapter in this book that most demands reflection-and rereading-is Chapter 17, where Henry David Thoreau is pitted against the myriad forces of the information age. As early as 1978 I was criticized by my literary colleagues for teaching the metaphysician of Walden Pond. At the time, I was working with Dr. Louis Uhle of USC on patterns of word usage in Renaissance English (primarily dramatic) texts as a scientific measure of authorship attribution. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them.

Another colleague from the life sciences took his students to the college lawns to look as if for the first time at the patterns of dandelion blossoms, evoking the kinds of questions that not much later spawned Chaos Theory. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.

Bailey's own accounts of elementary school children discerning the grounds for identifying a species that had remained unperceived by the "experts" reminds me of those halcyon days-before I also drifted into "line and circle" problem solving of the probabilistic kind. We had no idea we were participating in a revolution of thought, and perhaps that was just as well.

A metaphor Bailey uses in After Thought, particularly in Chapter 17, is that of understanding the behavior of rivers, and I think he was trying to suggest something about the elusive construct of Nature, which, if we should only drop our preconceptions and listen, would always surprise us. The Mississippi, like the Nile (or the Yangtze, for that matter), remains a keen scientific concern, but offers no easy understanding.

Yes, we have the potential to engage in collaborative enterprises involving computers and networks around the globe-the greatest parallel processing enterprise, in size and scale of any age. The question is, how much closer to essential truths this endeavor brings us?

Bailey would have us understand that we are about to transcend the time of maths as we know them and that we shall reach a new plateau of pattern recognition that renders the schema of ancient Babylon, the thinking of Kepler and even the cogitation of the Sante Fe Institute fellows obsolete. Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. The leaps of genius have outrun the numbers throughout history, however the scientific elite have formulated them. Our experts propose; Nature disposes otherwise. The human intellect itself has been found far more powerful than the sum of all the crunching power of all the machines in being or under consideration-working individually or working together.

Two cautions to Bailey's line of reasoning-for its determinism seems to partake of the confining features of Newton's laws, which he claims to eschew. First, no true scientist ever deceives himself or herself that absolutes are inviolate. Second, the very open inquiry at the root of the scientific method-even among the ancient Greeks-has never really surrendered to the rigors of numbers.

We fall between the pattern that has broken and the patterns that we sense as possible in Chaos every time. Taken that way, we can all still engage in our common task of understanding taking the fruits of our data looms as yet another set of features against which we try to move from apprehension to comprehension, the latter of which we approach as that dark and all-transforming glass of eternity.

Rating:
Summary: the muddled analysis demonstrates nothing
Review: I'm an artificial intelligence person, and I bought this book to keep up-to-date with what popularizers are saying about my field. Now I wish I hadn't--it's too depressing. James Bailey got caught up in the promise of the wave of trendy data-driven learning algorithms like neural networks and genetic algorithms, and the purpose of the book is to gush about them. There's no attempt to place these methods in the broader context of artificial intelligence as a whole, and no recognition of their weaknesses. The book randomly names these methods the "new intermaths" and analyzes them historically as a radical breakthrough from the traditional sequential, numeric, data-poor human reasoning into the brave new world of parallel, non-numeric, data-rich silicon reckoning. He's partly right about that, but I think it's a coincidence; the book's argument is so muddled that it doesn't reach any convincing conclusion.