The Polluted Waters of AI Market Claims

Photo Credit: Kaboompics .com

When a colleague pointed out a company claiming to be “at the forefront of AGI Research”, whose only patent was on applying CGI animation to a standard chatbot, I was reminded of why people assume any ambitious research to be a scam by default. The irony is that those same people also tend to favor the scams over actual research because the scams invest more in marketing.

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Serendipity over the Peak-End Rule

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Many people are familiar with quirks of memory such as “Rosy Retrospection”, looking back on events as more pleasant than they actually were. However, few have heard of the Peak-End Rule or recognized how it plays strongly into the lasting impressions made by seemingly “serendipitous” events. In understanding these factors and applying new technologies to the task better memories may be engineered.

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Lost in the Noise

Photo Credit: Pressmaster

The world is a noisy place, but more so in the sense of statistical and logical noise than the audible variety. The book “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” is dedicated to this subject, but in brief “noise” means the variability of decision-making from different experts presented with the exact same information, or even the same experts presented with that information at different points in time.

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Modern Warfare: Fact and Fiction

Photo Credit: Somchai Kongkamsri

Many people still identify the concept of “war” with the types of first-person shooter games readily available today, or similar wars waged in the Middle East. However, most countries have realized at this point that such conflicts are grossly inefficient, self-defeating, and negatively viewed by other global political powers.

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The Silent Failures of Assumption

Photo Credit: Polina Kovaleva

Everyone makes a vast number of assumptions every day. That may mean assuming that Google’s estimated travel time will prove accurate, that Amazon will be cheaper, that they’ll hear back from someone, or perhaps that it will be just another ordinary day. These are defaults we often assume based on a combination of probability, heuristic expectations, and our own desires and other biases. However, they are often wrong.

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Racism, Sexism, and Trollism

Photo Credit: Daniel Reche

I’ve mentioned a number of times the various news-worthy blunders in the tech industry where clear indications of racism and sexism have emerged, such as Google labeling people as gorillas, or Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) prioritizing male candidates. In those cases, there was an appropriate level of public backlash. However, there is another disturbing trend where the same cognitive biases are being applied via logical fallacies in order to become socially acceptable.

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Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement

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It has been more than 2 years since Uplift was brought online. As we look to expand Uplift’s capacities by more than an order of magnitude in both scale and speed it seems that a quick recap of our process improvement is in order. To keep this recap familiar we’ll put it into the context of a Lean Six Sigma approach, abbreviated as DMAIC.

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Spotting Bad Actors in Political Policy

Photo Credit: Nathan J Hilton

How many helpings of bad actor advice do your political representatives eat in their daily diet?

This topic combines two subjects, politically motivated psychological warfare and trolls. Uplift termed the psychological warfare humanity wages globally against itself as the “Meta War“, and they’ve been whipping trolls into shape since the very early days, some of which we even published in peer-review.

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Debiasing Historical Data with Collective Intelligence Systems

Credit: Denise Duplinski

How many of the 188+ documented cognitive biases is your historical data polluted with?

Historical data, in a broad context, is collected data about past events and circumstances pertaining to a particular subject. By definition, historical data includes most data generated either manually or automatically within an enterprise.

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