Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We have come a long way with AI aiding in decisions. The machine is powerful and new. Or is it?

AI is helping us decide what to do. It performs analysis in seconds that would have taken weeks or months. Wow! Look at us now—machine-aided decisions. Great new stuff.

Or is it? Seems that we have been using machines to aid decisions for … well, several thousand years. And these machines aiding decisions use probability to predict the future and aid our troubled minds just like today’s approach to AI predicts the next word based on the probability of all words gathered during training.

Hmm. What ancient machine-aided decisions? Flip a coin.

A coin can be used as a lever, so it is a machine. The two sides of a coin are different and that difference is easily distinguished on sight. Which side will appear is based on probability. The next side up depends to some degree on all the results of all the prior tosses into the air.

Flipping a coin is artificial intelligence. The decision the coin flip helps determines depends on the question we ask before flipping. Hmm. Sounds like prompt engineering.

Wait. Stop. Nope. There must be something wrong with this analogy. Good grief. A penny only costs a penny and I can use that penny again and again. An AI datacenter costs a few gazillion pennies. Could it be that we are … naw. Can’t be. We’re too smart for that.

Now, what’s the next word I should type in this little blog post. Hmm. Sentences start with either a noun or verb, so heads is a noun, tails is a verb, and then…wait a minute. A coin flip didn’t write this. Or did it?