[LINK] Australian Government Trial of Generative AI for Law, Education, Health, and Aged Care

[Roger Clarke]

On 9/3/2024 13:33, David wrote:
 > Personally, I first came across neural networks in the late 60's when 
my Supervisor at the time was experimenting with them on a very slow 
common-or-garden engineering computer.  But we could still see the model 
learning...

Where 'the model learning' =
'model-parameters being adjusted by software on the basis of pre-defined 
aspects of the data-inputs'

I don't want to play down the significance, because it was indeed a 
generational change in the mode of software development.

But it helps to remain balanced about artefacts' capabilities when 
anthropomorphic terms are avoided.

I wrote in 1990-91, in 'A Contingency Approach to the Application 
Software Generations', in s.8 (The Application Software Generations as 
Levels of Abstraction), at:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/SwareGenns.html#ASGLA

 > The shape of at least one further generation is emerging from the 
mists. Connectionist or neural machines, whether implemented in software 
or using massively parallel hardware architectures, involve a conception 
of knowledge yet more abstract than knowledge-bases containing 
production rules.
 >
 > In essence, such a knowledge-base contains empirical data expressed 
in some common language, but stored in a manner very close to its 
original form, rather than in a summary form such as rules.

[ My use of 'form very close to' was misleading. ]

 > The application contains no pre-packaged solutions to pre-defined 
problems (as third generation technology requires), no explicit 
problem-definition (as is necessary when using 4GLs), and does not even 
contain an explicit domain-model (as is the case with knowledge-based [ 
most commonly rule-based] technology).
 >
 > With sixth generation application software technology, the human 
'software developer' abdicates the responsibility of understanding the 
domain, and merely pours experience into the machine. Rather than acting 
as teacher, the person becomes a maintenance operative, keeping the 
decision factory running.

30 years later, I say it a little differently from that.  But that did 
manage to build in the notions of (merely) empirical, abdication of 
responsibility / decision factory [i.e. decision system, not decision 
support system], and maintenance operative not teacher.


But in the late 60s, I was very prosaically writing a little Fortran 
(before it even had version-numbers) and was shortly going to embark on 
writing rather more code in that deeply intellectual language, COBOL.  I 
don't think I heard of neural networks until a *long* time after that.



 > ...or at some risk of repeating myself, HAL in "2001: A Space 
Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke.  HAL developed self-awareness and took it 
upon itself (if that's the right pronoun!) to kill the crew and run the 
mission according to HAL's own estimate of it's importance.

For Christmas, my kids, ever-desperate to avoid resorting to socks or 
handkerchiefs, gave me a T-shirt with these words emblazoned on it:

           'I'm sorry Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that.'

I squeezed that [unrelated Clarke] idea into an article on Asimov, here:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/Asimov.html#RTFToC20


-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

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Visiting Professorial Fellow                          UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University