Was Hitler’s birth the cause of WWII?
If you’re hit by a car on the way to buy a pack of cigarettes, did smoking cause your death?
Would we have airplanes without Orville and Wilbur Wright?
Will your trip to the grocery store in your 1966 Mustang cause the 100-year snowstorm in the midwest?
If you sleep less than 8 hours per day, will you get cancer?
AI is great at two things that humans aren’t: a) performing bajillions of iterations and computations, and 2) scaling capability with minimal cost (i.e., more compute resources are cheap).
The answers to the questions above, if answerable at all, lie in the realm of chaos theory — complex, multi-variable, interconnected, non-linear systems.
So, let’s apply AI to them. AI is built for chaos.
Unfortunately, we probably won’t learn the definitive answers because the systems are non-deterministic.
We will, however, learn some things we probably don’t know today. Factors that we’re either not thinking about, or not focused on, but may have large effects. Also, factors that we’re currently focused on, but probably aren’t important. So it’s worth going down this road and AI is a great partner.
However, when you look at the questions up front, you probably already have your answer for one or more of them. How is that?
Because solutions to chaotic, complex, non-deterministic systems aren’t toggle-switch, single-cause, or definitive. They are dependent upon time, space, and perspective.
We, the humans, provide the perspective.
