Blog

UN2045: Building a Trustworthy Economy

19 Jul, 2020

Today’s financial systems are not trusted by citizens because they are inherently unstable and winner-take-all, so for most people the system offers only failure.  Today, new digital technologies allow the fine-grain feedback needed to build systems...

AI’s struggle to reach “understanding” and “meaning”

19 Jul, 2020

Deep learning is very good at ferreting out correlations between tons of data points, but when it comes to digging deeper into the data and forming abstractions and concepts, they barely scratch the surface (even that might be an overstatement). We have...

Data versus Science: Contesting the Soul of Data-Science

07 Jul, 2020

SummaryThe post below is written for the upcoming Spanish translation of The Book of Why, which was announced today. It expresses my firm belief that the current data-fitting direction taken by “Data Science” is temporary (read my lips!), that the...

Race, COVID Mortality, and Simpson’s Paradox (by Dana Mackenzie)

06 Jul, 2020

Summary This post reports on the presence of Simpson’s paradox in the latest CDC data on coronavirus. At first glance, the data may seem to support the notion that coronavirus is especially dangerous to white, non-Hispanic people. However, when we take...

Artificial intelligence: The dark matter of computer vision

04 Jul, 2020

What makes us humans so good at making sense of visual data? That’s a question that has preoccupied artificial intelligence and computer vision scientists for decades. Efforts at reproducing the capabilities of human vision have so far yielded results...