Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• What AI Can Tell Us About Intelligence

  Can deep learning systems learn to manipulate symbols? The answers might change our understanding of how intelligence works and what makes humans unique.

  The high stakes explain why claims that DL has hit a wall are so provocative. If Marcus and the nativists are right, DL will never get to human-like AI, no matter how many new architectures it comes up with or how much computing power it throws at it. It is just confusion to keep adding more layers, because genuine symbolic manipulation demands an innate symbolic manipulator, full stop. And since this symbolic manipulation is at the base of several abilities of common sense, a DL-only system will never possess anything more than a rough-and-ready understanding of anything.

  By contrast, if DL advocates and the empiricists are right, it’s the idea of inserting a module for symbolic manipulation that is confused. In that case, DL systems are already engaged in symbolic reasoning and will continue to improve at it as they become better at satisfying constraints through more multimodal self-supervised learning, an increasingly useful predictive world-model, and an expansion of working memory for simulating and evaluating outcomes. Introducing a symbolic manipulation module would not lead to more human-like AI, but instead force all “reasoning” operations through an unnecessary and unmotivated bottleneck that would take us further from human-like intelligence. This threatens to cut off one of the most impressive aspects to deep learning: its ability to come up with far more useful and clever solutions than the ones human programmers conceive of.

• Bill Gates says crypto and NFTs are a sham

  Don't count Bill Gates among the fans of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Those digital asset trends are "100% based on greater fool theory," the Microsoft co-founder said Tuesday at a TechCrunch conference, referencing the notion that investors can make money on worthless or overvalued assets as long as people are willing to bid them higher.

• FIRE: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

  Doing the work the ACLU use to do.

  The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

• Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy

  Non-invasive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by canine olfaction could be one alternative to NPS RT-PCR when it is necessary to obtain a result very quickly according to the same indications as antigenic tests in the context of mass screening.

• Poor Prospects--Not Inequality--Motivate Political Violence

  We present two arguments: despite being a key explanatory variable in existing research, perceived lower economic status vis-à-vis other individuals (an indicator of relative deprivation) is unlikely to motivate people to participate in violence; by contrast, although virtually unexplored, a projected decrease in one's own economic status (prospective decremental deprivation) is likely to motivate violence. Multilevel analyses of probability samples from many African countries provide evidence to support these claims.

• Fewer Americans than ever believe in God, Gallup poll shows

  Belief in God among Americans dipped to a new low, Gallup's latest poll shows. While the majority of adults in the U.S. believe in God, belief has dropped to 81% — the lowest ever recorded by Gallup -and is down from 87% in 2017. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God, Gallup reported. Younger, liberal Americans are the least likely to believe in God, according to Gallup's May 2-22 values and beliefs poll results released Friday. Political conservatives and married adults had little change when comparing 2022 data to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017. The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62% of whom believe in God), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%), while belief in God is highest among conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%).
  
  The poll also found that slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans say they believe God hears prayers and can intervene, as well as 32% of Democrats, 25% of liberals and 30% of young adults. Gallup said it has documented steeper drops in church attendance, membership and confidence in organized religion, which suggests that the practice of religious faith is changing more than general belief in God.

Some recent items about staying healthy while getting older.

• How much physical activity do older adults need?

  Physical Activity is Essential to Healthy Aging.

  Adults aged 65 and older need:
  • At least 150 minutes a week (for example, 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week) of moderate intensity activity such as brisk walking. Or they need 75 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity activity such as hiking, jogging, or running.
  • At least 2 days a week of activities that strengthen muscles.
  • Activities to improve balance such as standing on one foot about 3 days a week.

  And related see: Trends in Nonfatal Falls and Fall-Related Injuries Among Adults Aged ≥65 Years — United States, 2012–2018.

• When Thinner Isn't Better

  Extra pounds may keep some people healthier after a certain age.

  "The BMI curve shifts to the right as you age,” Nicklas explains, “meaning higher weight is better in older age.” Those extra pounds buffer against unintended weight loss due to digestive system conditions (or things like dental issues) that prevent people from eating enough. They can also offer protection from heart failure or COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). And extra padding can help prevent life-threatening fractures if an older old person falls.

  What's more, “if you're really thin, then you lose weight in your 80s, you are at risk of becoming frail,” says David Reuben, a specialist in geriatric internal medicine at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, Calif. (Frailty is a clinical syndrome in which three or more of the following criteria are present: unintentional weight loss of 10 pounds in a year; self-reported exhaustion; weakness; slow walking speed; and low physical activity). If you're over 80 and have a BMI below 20, Reuben says, you're in the frailty zone.

• Single brain scan can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease

  A single MRI scan of the brain could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research by Imperial College London.

  The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer’s. The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that it can identify the disease at an early stage when it can be very difficult to diagnose.

• Oncology's Darwinian Dilemma

  But the rub is that this immunotherapy revolution applies only to a narrow set of patients. Some benefit, but the majority do not. And patients who are cured constitute an even smaller minority. Why is this? How can immunotherapy cure a 65-year-old, newly retired man of Stage IV lung cancer, restoring the promise of his golden years with his family, but do nothing for the 55-year-old woman whose cancer robs her of decades of life? We do not know. A flurry of research is aimed at trying to answer this question. And what it is uncovering is the sheer variety of lung cancer and lung cancer patients. No two patients with lung cancer are the same. Their tumors have different genetic mutations. Their immune systems behave differently. We are even learning that their metabolisms can affect responses to treatment. And, astonishingly, emerging evidence suggests that the billions of bacteria that colonize their skin, lungs, and colons play a role in how they respond to cancer treatment.
  ...
  Variation may be liberating: it can provide hope to patients and families. But that hope could very well be purchased at the cost of undue suffering: the same uncertainty that carries the promise of a cure carries the possibility of suffering.