Can AI do SD?

There are lots of interesting developments in machine learning for time series modeling, but can an AI write about systems sensibly? I decided to try a few free online AI content generators.

Using system dynamics modeling for project delay and disruption

1. System Dynamics Modeling (SDM)

System dynamics modeling is a mathematical model that helps us understand how systems work and how they interact with each other. SDM is useful for understanding complex systems and their behavior over time. In addition, it can help predict future outcomes based on current conditions.

2. Project Delay & Disruption

Project delays and disruptions occur frequently in projects. These events cause significant problems for organizations and individuals alike. A project delay occurs when a project is delayed past its original completion date. A project disruption occurs when a project is disrupted before it reaches its original completion date. Both types of project delays and disruptions can have negative effects on the success of a project.

3. Causes of Project Delays & Disruptions

There are many causes of project delays and disruptions. Some of these causes include:

• Poor planning

• Unclear requirements

• Lack of communication

• Poor management

• Miscommunication

• Poor leadership

• Poor team coordination

• Poor resource allocation

Well, we didn’t get the rework cycle or any feedback effects, but not an entirely useless effort.

Do climate tipping points signal the onset of Limits to Growth?

Climate change is a serious human problem that causes concern among many people. Some believe that climate change is caused by human activity and that it will bring about a catastrophic future. However, others believe that it is natural and that there are ways to prevent it from causing further damage. Regardless of whether climate change is caused by human activity or not, it has the potential to cause major damage to the planet. Many believe that we are approaching climate tipping points, which could have catastrophic consequences for humanity.

One reason why climate tipping points signal the onset of limits to growth is because they are a harbinger of future environmental disasters. These disasters would occur because of the way we have altered the climate and what we have done to the planet. For example, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica broke away in 2002 and disintegrated within four years due to global warming. Climate tipping points signal the onset of limits to growth because they are a harbinger of future environmental disasters. Governments and environmental groups should prepare for future environmental disasters by investing in renewable resources and making changes in agriculture to reduce food insecurity.

Another reason why climate tipping points signal the onset of limits to growth is because they are a harbinger of future economic problems. Scientists have warned us about manmade climate change for years; however, most people ignore their warnings and keep on using fossil fuels anyway. This is causing major problems for our planet, including droughts, rising sea levels and more frequent natural disasters. Unfortunately, many people are paying little attention to the warnings; they think they can ignore them and avoid problems later. Governments and environmental groups should prepare for future economic problems by investing in renewable resources and making changes in agriculture to reduce food insecurity.

I have to say, the AI is making more sense than the South Dakota legislature.

Should hunters try to harvest more deer to help slow the growth of chronic wasting disease? Or is the cure worse than the disease, so we are merely killing deer now to avoid them dying later?

This is a case of a deer that had been found dead by an early hunter, then found by another hunter on the same day. These hunters were in the woods for several days, hunting deer. Then, for a week or more, the deer had eaten enough grass to cover itself, leaving the deer lying in its own feces. In the United States, this is called wasting. Chronic wasting is an infectious disease that, in humans, is caused by bacteria. When a person is infected with chronic wasting, they begin losing weight and become weak. They begin to smell bad, have sores on their body, lose their appetite, feel tired, listless and weak, having trouble standing up. Some people lose consciousness. Their physical…

I guess we still need modelers for some things.

Limits to Big Data

I’m skeptical of the idea that machine learning and big data will automatically lead to some kind of technological nirvana, a Star Trek future in which machines quickly learn all the physics needed for us to live happily ever after.

First, every other human technology has been a mixed bag, with improvements in welfare coming along with some collateral damage. It just seems naive to think that this one will be different.


These are not the primary problem.

Second, I think there are some good reasons to think that problems will get harder at the same rate that machines get smarter. The big successes I’ve seen are localized point prediction problems, not integrated systems with a lot of feedback. As soon as causality are separated in time and space by complex mechanisms, you’re into sloppy systems territory, where data may constrain only a few parameters at a time. Making progress in such systems will increasingly require integration of multiple theories and data from multiple sources.

People in domains that have made heavy use of big data increasingly recognize this: Continue reading “Limits to Big Data”

DYNAMO

Today I was looking for DYNAMO documentation of the TRND macro. Lo and behold, archive.org has the second edition of the DYNAMO User Guide online. It reminds me that I was lucky to have missed the punch card era:

… but not quite lucky enough to miss timesharing and the teletype:

The computer under my desk today would have been the fastest in the world the year I finished my dissertation. We’ve come a long way.

Detecting the inconsistency of BS

DARPA put out a request for a BS detector for science. I responded with a strategy for combining the results of multiple models (using Rahmandad, Jalali & Paynabar’s generalized meta-analysis with some supporting infrastructure like data archiving) to establish whether new findings are consistent with an existing body of knowledge.

DARPA didn’t bite. I have no idea why, but could speculate from the RFC that they had in mind something more like a big data approach that would use text analysis to evaluate claims. Hopefully not, because a text-only approach will have limited power. Here’s why.

Continue reading “Detecting the inconsistency of BS”

AI babble passes the Turing test

Here’s a nice example of how AI is killing us now. I won’t dignify this with a link, but I found it posted by a LinkedIn user.

I’d call this an example of artificial stupidity, not AI. The article starts off sounding plausible, but quickly degenerates into complete nonsense that’s either automatically generated or translated, with catastrophic results. But it was good enough to make it past someone’s cognitive filters.

For years, corporations have targeted on World Health Organization to indicate ads to and once to indicate the ads. AI permits marketers to, instead, specialize in what messages to indicate the audience, therefore, brands will produce powerful ads specific to the target market. With programmatic accounting for 67% of all international show ads in 2017, AI is required quite ever to make sure the inflated volume of ads doesn’t have an effect on the standard of ads.

One style of AI that’s showing important promise during this space is tongue process (NLP). informatics could be a psychological feature machine learning technology which will realize trends in behavior and traffic an equivalent method an individual’s brain will. mistreatment informatics during this method can match ads with people supported context, compared to only keywords within the past, thus considerably increasing click rates and conversions.

 

AI is killing us now

I’ve been watching the debate over AI with some amusement, as if it were some other planet at risk. The Musk-Zuckerberg kerfuffle is the latest installment. Ars Technica thinks they’re both wrong:

At this point, these debates are largely semantic.

I don’t see how anyone could live through the last few years and fail to notice that networking and automation have enabled an explosion of fake news, filter bubbles and other information pathologies. These are absolutely policy relevant, and smarter AI is poised to deliver more of what we need least. The problem is here now, not from some impending future singularity.

Ars gets one point sort of right:

Plus, computer scientists have demonstrated repeatedly that AI is no better than its datasets, and the datasets that humans produce are full of errors and biases. Whatever AI we produce will be as flawed and confused as humans are.

I don’t think the data is really the problem; it’s the assumptions the data’s treated with and the context in which that occurs that’s really problematic. In any case, automating flawed aspects of ourselves is not benign!

Here’s what I think is going on:

AI, and more generally computing and networks are doing some good things. More data and computing power accelerate the discovery of truth. But truth is still elusive and expensive. On the other hand, AI is making bullsh!t really cheap (pardon the technical jargon). There are many mechanisms by which this occurs:

These amplifiers of disinformation serve increasingly concentrated wealth and power elites that are isolated from their negative consequences, and benefit from fueling the process. We wind up wallowing in a sea of information pollution (the deadliest among the sins of managing complex systems).

As BS becomes more prevalent, various reinforcing mechanisms start kicking in. Accepted falsehoods erode critical thinking abilities, and promote the rejection of ideas like empiricism that were the foundation of the Enlightenment. The proliferation of BS requires more debunking, taking time away from discovery. A general erosion of trust makes it harder to solve problems, opening the door for opportunistic rent-seeking non-solutions.

I think it’s a matter of survival for us to do better at critical thinking, so we can shift the balance between truth and BS. That might be one area where AI could safely assist. We have other assets as well, like the explosion of online learning opportunities. But I think we also need some cultural solutions, like better management of trust and anonymity, brakes on concentration, sanctions for lying, rewards for prediction, and more time for reflection.

Data Science should be about more than data

There are lots of “top 10 skills” lists for data science and analytics. The ones I’ve seen are all missing something huge.

Here’s an example:

Business Broadway – Top 10 Skills in Data Science

Modeling barely appears here. Almost all the items concern the collection and analysis of data (no surprise there). Just imagine for a moment what it would be like if science consisted purely of observation, with no theorizing.

What are you doing with all those data points and the algorithms that sift through them? At some point, you have to understand whether the relationships that emerge from your data make any sense and answer relevant questions. For that, you need ways of thinking and talking about the structure of the phenomena you’re looking at and the problems you’re trying to solve.

I’d argue that one’s literacy in data science is greatly enhanced by knowledge of mathematical modeling and simulation. That could be system dynamics, control theory, physics, economics, discrete event simulation, agent based modeling, or something similar. The exact discipline probably doesn’t matter, so long as you learn to formalize operational thinking about a problem, and pick up some good habits (like balancing units) along the way.

Hair of the dog that bit you climate policy

Roy Spencer on reducing emissions by increasing emissions:

COL: Let’s say tomorrow, evidence is found that proves to everyone that global warming as a result of human released emissions of CO2 and methane, is real. What would you suggest we do?

SPENCER: I would say we need to grow the economy as fast as possible, in order to afford the extra R&D necessary to develop new energy technologies. Current solar and wind technologies are too expensive, unreliable, and can only replace a small fraction of our energy needs. Since the economy runs on inexpensive energy, in order to grow the economy we will need to use fossil fuels to create that extra wealth. In other words, we will need to burn even more fossil fuels in order to find replacements for fossil fuels.

via Planet 3.0

On the face of it, this is absurd. Reverse a positive feedback loop by making it stronger? But it could work, if given the right structure – a relative quit smoking by going in a closet to smoke until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Here’s what I can make of the mental model:

Spencer’s arguing that we need to run reinforcing loops R1 and R2 as hard as possible, because loop R3 is too weak to sustain the economy, because renewables (or more generally non-emitting sources) are too expensive. R1 and R2 provide the wealth to drive R&D, in a virtuous cycle R4 that activates R3 and shuts down the fossil sector via B2. There are a number of problems with this thinking.

  • Rapid growth around R1 rapidly grows environmental damage (B1) – not only climate, but also local air quality, etc. It also contributes to depletion (not shown), and with depletion comes increasing cost (weakening R1) and greater marginal damage from extraction technologies (not shown). It makes no sense to manage the economy as if R1 exists and B1 does not. R3 looks much more favorable today in light of this.
  • Spencer’s view discounts delays. But there are long delays in R&D and investment turnover, which will permit more environmental damage to accumulate while we wait for R&D.
  • In addition to the delay, R4 is weak. For example, if economic growth is 3%/year, and all technical progress in renewables is from R&D with a 70% learning rate, it’ll take 44 years to halve renewable costs.
  • A 70% learning curve for R&D is highly optimistic. Moreover, a fair amount of renewable cost reductions are due to learning-by-doing and scale economies (not shown), which require R3 to be active, not R4. No current deployment, no progress.
  • Spencer’s argument ignores efficiency (not shown), which works regardless of the source of energy. Spurring investment in the fossil loop R1 sends the wrong signal for efficiency, by depressing current prices.

In truth, these feedbacks are already present in many energy models. Most of those are standard economic stuff – equilibrium, rational expectations, etc. – assumptions which favor growth. Yet among the subset that includes endogenous technology, I’m not aware of a single instance that finds a growth+R&D led policy to be optimal or even effective.

It’s time for the techno-optimists like Spencer and Breakthrough to put up or shut up. Either articulate the argument in a formal model that can be shared and tested, or admit that it’s a nice twinkle in the eye that regrettably lacks evidence.

Thorium Dreams

The NY Times nails it in In Search of Energy Miracles:

Yet not even the speedy Chinese are likely to get a sizable reactor built before the 2020s, and that is true for the other nuclear projects as well. So even if these technologies prove to work, it would not be surprising to see the timeline for widespread deployment slip to the 2030s or the 2040s. The scientists studying climate change tell us it would be folly to wait that long to start tackling the emissions problem.

Two approaches to the issue — spending money on the technologies we have now, or investing in future breakthroughs — are sometimes portrayed as conflicting with one another. In reality, that is a false dichotomy. The smartest experts say we have to pursue both tracks at once, and much more aggressively than we have been doing.

An ambitious national climate policy, anchored by a stiff price on carbon dioxide emissions, would serve both goals at once. In the short run, it would hasten a trend of supplanting coal-burning power plants with natural gas plants, which emit less carbon dioxide. It would drive some investment into low-carbon technologies like wind and solar power that, while not efficient enough, are steadily improving.

And it would also raise the economic rewards for developing new technologies that could disrupt and displace the ones of today. These might be new-age nuclear reactors, vastly improved solar cells, or something entirely unforeseen.

In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth.

Yep.

h/t Travis Franck

What a real breakthrough might look like

It’s possible that a techno fix will stave off global limits indefinitely, in a Star Trek future scenario. I think it’s a bad idea to rely on it, because there’s no backup plan.

But it’s equally naive to think that we can return to some kind of low-tech golden age. There are too many people to feed and house, and those bygone eras look pretty ugly when you peer under the mask.

But this is a false dichotomy.

Some techno/growth enthusiasts talk about sustainability as if it consisted entirely of atavistic agrarian aspirations. But what a lot of sustainability advocates are after, myself included, is a high-tech future that operates within certain material limits (planetary boundaries, if you will) before those limits enforce themselves in nastier ways. That’s not really too hard to imagine; we already have a high tech economy that operates within limits like the laws of motion and gravity. Gravity takes care of itself, because it’s instantaneous. Stock pollutants and resources don’t, because consequences are remote in time and space from actions; hence the need for coordination. Continue reading “What a real breakthrough might look like”