[topicmaps-comment] Re: on the Manhattan project for the KnowledgeSciences

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Paul,

I can only speak for myself and say that I just don't have enough 
time for the all-out effort that would be required from me for making 
the June 10, 2002 deadline, not without sacrificing previous 
commitments. However I hope someone in our effort can find the time 
to do so.

The president of American Airlines seems intent on making himself and 
the rest of the airline fleets a stunning example of just how 
shortsighted we can be since he just voiced his opinion that the 
extra security we placed on our air fleets are no longer needed 
because he does not think that the airlines are a target for 
terrorists any longer.

Best of Luck, it looks like we'll need it.

Rex


At 9:08 PM -0400 6/2/02, paul wrote:
>Open public letter..  please forward as you wish.
>
>Rex,
>
>In reading your message to me, and in reflecting on some parts of other
>recent conversations, I realize - once again - that it is a hard sell for me
>(or anyone) to indicate that there MIGHT be a bias against the biological
>model of intelligence by computer technologists (and IT marketers) ... that
>it is not merely (as you put it) "basic laziness or unwillingness to spend
>time outside their normal activities and habits" .
>
>The deficit to this bias, if it does exist, might be reflected in the
>limitations that we clearly see in the kinds of artificial intelligence that
>folks like the FBI Director think is going to make things a lot better in
>terms of intelligence vetting.  It is not ranting, on my part, to suggest
>that AI does not and can not solve the decision support and recognition of
>novelty problems that are likely to the be next threat that the "system"
>does not see. Penrose and Rosen and others set the problem out very clearly.
>
>What the FBI "need" for AI will do is put more money, much more money, in
>the pockets of DoD IT vendors, who think that R&D is a buzz word having
>something to do with selling half baked product.  As a general principle, IT
>vendors are focused on making money, not on solving problems.
>
>During the confusion involved in spending this money no one will be able to
>criticize the effort based on scientific merit.  And later next year when we
>get hit again...  some how the whole claim that AI will make it predictive
>and preventative will be forgotten.
>
>It is as if we (with the help of our news media) can not remember those
>things that we should remember.  What was the intelligence failure when all
>intelligence agencies failed to predict Pakistan starting to test atomic
>bombs?  It was the notion that - in spite of the clear evidence - no one
>should expect what actually happened.
>
>I would not be making this type of message public except that I am very
>fearful about the New War taking an unexpected turn that need not occur if
>openness, truth and honesty were the first principle of our foreign and
>public policy.  If India attacks Pakistan, and there is a Nuclear war there,
>then an American city will suffer a similar fate soon after.  Why?  It is
>simply because of the tremendous suffering that (predictably) some people in
>the East will feel should be shared by those who they feel built the weapons
>and made the war a reality.  This is Predictive Analysis Methodology, and
>this is not understood in the Middle East, and not in our establishment.
>
>Society is too powerful to not have real knowledge of what is really going
>on in the world.  We must find our way to the knowledge age, and in doing
>so, we must avoid all of the religious fundamentalists and the scientific
>reductionists also.  We must take the babble that they say openly as how
>they really feel.  Their intense believes drives them to make their vote
>count many times more than those who are the mainstream.  War and confusion
>is on the path to the rapture, and thus is desirable (to them).
>
>What will make human/machine intelligence predictive and preventative is a
>system of knowledge sharing and the avoidance of making everything useful
>classified.  This means, oddly enough, that we can win the New War by
>returning to the democratic practice of informing the public about what is
>actually reality.  We can lose the New War and the democracy by pumping
>billons more into IT concepts that are illusions and then so abuse the
>Constitution so as to invade the privacy of anyone...  and to look the other
>way while this invasion of privacy is happening big time by the Microsoft
>developers community.
>
>The common factor is control of social reality by pure blind and greedy
>economics.
>
>My feeling (after hearing the FBI Director make statements that clearly are
>not and can not be TRUE in the Sunday talk shows) is a reinforcement that
>this American administration is going to get milked by IT and the DoD
>cottage industries (again) over this AI Dream myth.  My feeling reminds me
>of my feeling about the comments of National Security Advisor Ms. C. Rice,
>"no one could have expected 9-11" when one frustrated FBI agent had just
>finished writing an entire book, 3 days before 9-11 took place on the fact
>that intelligence vetting or the known facts (pre - 9 -11) regarding Bin
>Ladin's use of US flight schools to train for the next big attack, was being
>actively blocked by the administrators of the intelligence systems.  These
>folks is expensive suits.
>
>Clearly there were folks who did expect something, and they did this without
>AI and without the full support of the intelligence systems. They opened
>their eyes and looked.
>
>Why is it that we (?) hid information from the public?
>
>So the FBI Director wants computers and AI to solve the problem of a
>Predictive Analysis Methodology?  Well, I  .....  (redacted) ...  he is
>listening to the same folks that will get a trademark on the term PAM
>(Predictive Analysis Methodology) and then go and try to find a scientist to
>put AI into the cyber warfare systems (without having a clue as to the real
>issues involved in the prediction of complex reality).  The Nation's
>(www.thenation.com) cover asking if the President is clueless is getting
>close to the mark.  But one hopes that he and our Nation will look closely
>at this funding the problem and avoiding the solution behavior.  God bless
>him and our Nation.
>
>***
>
>The solution is a new kind of computer science, one that recognizes the
>difference between the cause in a formal system (logical entailment) and the
>causes in a natural system (physical entailment) such as a human mind or a
>human community.  And the solution is a new kind of openness about the
>failure of not only the human organizations that hid incompetence and
>laziness, behind the notion of "National Security", but also the information
>technology that our society has paid for and paid for and will pay for
>again... but that has still not addressed the required grounding of computer
>theory in some type of natural science.
>
>I think I have the argument down to the relationship between reductionism,
>the defense of a status quo that has perhaps lead us down the wrong path (to
>scientific reductionism and AI) and the technical difficulty of the
>backgrounds that I have learned (over forty years of hard work) ...
>advanced and pure mathematics and foundations of logic plus a considerable
>amount of cognitive neuroscience and immunology...
>
>Perhaps the single easiest entrance into the grounded understanding of the
>limitation of the current computer science paradigm is in the computer
>science community's use (mis-use) of the word complexity.  In the scholarly
>work to which I make reference in:
>
>http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/book.htm
>
>we define complexity in a way that would give a computer an halting
>condition with formally both a = b and a Not(=) b at the same time.  So in
>the category theory of Rosen and perhaps Penrose, there simply can not be
>computational complexity - when defined in this natural science sense.
>Complexity is a property of all real systems, even any non living system
>like a computer is complex (has quantum mechanical fluctuation for example)
>..... but not a property of a computer program (oddly enough). All computer
>processes are simple, even the entire Internet (.. Kat, I say this to you
>again. .. )
>
>The "stratified complexity" view of natural science has huge implications to
>computer science and ultimately to the kind of knowledge technology that the
>FBI Director needs but does not know about.  Human markup of communication
>and human behaviors can be made sense of only if one sees what those in the
>science of human memory, awareness and anticipation see... that separate
>levels of organization are responsible and necessary to natural intelligence
>and human behavior.
>
>Also, using the notion of emergence, one can show that in most cases,
>natural science would define emergence to be a process that has the property
>of being non-reversible - and nothing in the computer's finite state machine
>can ever not be reversible.
>
>There are questions about the fundamental differences between "simulating
>the effects of natural law" and having natural law cause motion.
>
>The specific argument is given in
>
>http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter2.htm
>
>
>So your position is partially correct.
>
>But the issue is action perception cycles .. and all that this really
>entails if we are to develop a "stratified" computational kernel for
>knowledge technology.  I think that we can do this and will write about it
>in the next few days.
>
>Thank you for looking at "Detection Event in Computational Space"
>
>http://www.ontologystream.com/cA/papers/cA-SPS.htm
>
>My work on a the computational kernel for knowledge technology is being
>developed at:
>
>http://www.ontologystream.com/admin/KTEcosystem.htm
>
>and I now have everyone's agreement that this presentation can be made
>public.
>
>It is only a working concept, and I ask that anyone who is able to bring the
>work of the human mark up community to this work to please give me a call.
>
>The NIST ATP deadline is June 10th... and I am interested in adding other
>junior partners to the Knowledge Net Consortium for those who feel that they
>should be in involved in this.
>
>My work on the proposed Manhattan Project for the Knowledge Sciences is at:
>
>http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/manhattan/sindex.htm
>
>
>Paul Prueitt, PhD
>703-981-2676


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