When Prediction Is Not Enough (with Teppo Felin)

If the Wright Brothers could have used AI to guide their decision
making, it’s almost certain they would never have gotten off the ground.
That’s because, points out Teppo Felin of Utah State University and
Oxford, all the evidence said human flight was impossible. So how and why
did the Wrights persevere? Felin explains that the human ability to
ignore existing data and evidence is not only our Achilles heel, but
also one of our superpowers. Topics include the problems inherent in
modeling our brains after computers, and the value of not only
data-driven prediction, but also belief-driven experimentation.
Links, transcript, and more information: www.econtalk.org/when-predict...
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[@jamesnathenson2119]

This one stands out as a wonderful episode.

[@cloudy2249]

Russ Roberts is a treasure. We need his brains and wisdom to last forever.

[@chadwilson2528]

Russ' Beethoven anecdote was probably supposed to be Mozart. Beethoven famously made many edits to his work while Mozart composed entire pieces in his head, and writing them down was just transcription.
Regarding the wider discussion, I have two main gripes with these types of AI arguments. The first is that people are typically talking in short or medium terms, seemingly 10-50 years, but sometimes use words like "never" or "can't", but would probably admit that the same thing is "inevitable" if the time span is lengthened to 1,000-10,000 years. The second is that the definitions of "human" and "computer" are rarely defined, as is the boundary between them. While making the argument of human superiority, they are integrated in some sense with computers, via typing or chatting over the Internet, with knowledge learned from the Internet and countless other technological innovations keeping them alive and thriving. If they had "nanobots" in their bloodstream or a neurolink type adapter in their brain assisting with certain processing, perhaps while they slept, what would the argument even look like at this point? It seems likely that the boundary between human and computer will shrink over the next century making this entire argument moot.