Jack Boss Coaching

A great revolution in artificial intelligence has followed from the realization that we are such creatures of habit.  Rather than trying to invent a computer that can think like us, AI engineers have begun to seek out massive archives of human behavior, organizing the data in such a way that a supercomputer can find relevant correlations and then probabilistically analyze the likelihood of any given possibility based on how often it has occurred in the past.

The best computer translation have leveraged our habitual cliches, utilizing one or another massive, multilingual corpus to create new translations of a given phrase or sentence by comparing it to a bunch of phrases or sentences a lot like it that have been translated before.  Similarly, chess playing computers now contain massive stores of games played, so that the computer doesn’t have to treat every single possible outcome equally, but rather can separate the likely from the highly improbably based on a huge data set of past outcomes.  (more examples of this phenomenon can be found in Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers.)

So, our lack of individuality–the way that we habitually behave the way that we have behaved or the way that others behave–comes in handy for endeavors that profit from standardization.  Constant newness would be chaos, but the endless repetition of the old and familiar is a form of death all its own.