I DONT UNDERSTAND TV

An analog thermostat is a thing of beauty! A small spiral of melded metal strips unwinds (or winds) as the one material expands more quickly than the other due to the increased jostling of its atoms-in other words, heat. I had a come-to-Jesus moment recently when I got a new digital thermostat and the technician told me to just discard the old one.

It doesnвЂ™t help that the whole вЂњhow things workвЂќ aspect of most things is hidden behind digital displays. Is that crystal clear blue sky вЂњnoiseвЂќ? It is if youвЂ™re trying to see a star. Separating signal from static is tricky, though. The вЂњnoiseвЂќ is everything else you never see, everything else you never know you never see.

I DONT UNDERSTAND TV

We all depend on AIs (willingly or not) to distill signal from noise in every aspect of our lives, helpfully narrowing our choices of news, footwear, political opinions, TV shows, word choice, friends. That makes it difficult for вЂњfuture warfightersвЂќ to trust them. Modern weapons are designed to think for themselves, but their usefulness is severely limited вЂњby the machineвЂ™s current inability to explain their decisions and actions to human users,вЂќ the DARPA paper explains. One illustration they cite comes from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-about the militaryвЂ™s need for вЂњexplainableвЂќ AI.

Answers arenвЂ™t the same as understanding. (Show your work!) This worrisome hitch is explored in a remarkably readable 60-page paper by quantum chemists Roald Hoffmann (Nobel laureate) and Jean-Paul Malrieu. How do they know whatвЂ™s important? Ah, thereвЂ™s the rub.ДЄI can assist, but the answers that machines give donвЂ™t help much if we donвЂ™t understand how they came to that conclusion. Most of the information wonвЂ™t get past the first or even the second or third round of automatic filtering systems, which behave like bouncers making sure scientists donвЂ™t waste time on anything thatвЂ™s not important. Imagine what itвЂ™s like to know that the vast majority of the treasures obtained by your gazillion-dollar particle accelerator or telescope will never be looked at by anybody! Cosmic-scale FOMO! My young friends tell me that one reason they feel like they donвЂ™t understand anything is that thereвЂ™s too much of everything to understand.Д¬onsider the astronomers and physicists whoвЂ™ve harvested such an abundance of data that their signal/noise problems are out of control.

When I whined to a friend about this, she suggested I tell people IвЂ™m 85. I admit my feathers got ruffled at first when people stopped telling me I didnвЂ™t look my age (75).

I dont understand