# Edlyn V. Levine - Cargo Cult AI (Highlights)  ## Metadata **Review**:: [readwise.io](https://readwise.io/bookreview/28203951) **Source**:: #from/readwise #from/reader **Zettel**:: #zettel/fleeting **Status**:: #x **Authors**:: [[Edlyn V. Levine]] **Full Title**:: Cargo Cult AI **Category**:: #articles #readwise/articles **Category Icon**:: 📰 **Document Tags**:: #artificial-intelligence #favorite **URL**:: [queue.acm.org](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595860) **Host**:: [[queue.acm.org]] **Highlighted**:: [[2023-05-26]] **Created**:: [[2023-05-28]] ## Highlights - This propensity of humans to so easily believe wonderful, fanciful things is what another physicist, Richard Feynman, called cargo cult science. Feynman named this phenomenon after a "cargo cult" of people in the Pacific Islands who believed that building replicas of landing strips and control towers would ensure supply planes continued to land after World War II.6 The planes never came. These people missed the fact that it was the advent of war, not the presence of landing strips that caused the planes to land there. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1aq6xfkf54g7hxgv3mq3ykh)) ^536390255 #cite - Today's data and resource abundance stands in sharp contrast to foundational algorithmic work at the dawn of the computing era, when innovations were based on scarcity. Computational memory and processing power were so limited and at such a premium that novel algorithmic approaches were needed to solve problems in scenarios where inefficient, brute-force methods were not possible. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1aqpkv6dbgwvg7ax2rbrdxv)) ^536391192 <!-- New highlights added June 3, 2023 at 10:54 PM --> - Finally, inverse problems [see sidebar, Can AI Hear the Shape of a Drum?] pose yet another challenge: even if all the relevant data about a system is available, it is still not possible to determine the cause due to non-uniqueness and the loss of information going from forward to inverse problems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1h2vbyrq3hc80c8hd1ap5cr)) ^537893744 - In the 1990s, mathematicians finally proved that it is, in fact, not possible to hear the shape of a drum, or at least not uniquely.9 This is because drumheads exist of different shapes that produce exactly the same sound, or in mathematical terms, are isospectral. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1h32z7tnbqfcv61wxjcfye6)) ^537895165 - A scarcity mindset will also be required to achieve algorithmic efficiencies that enable sustainable levels of resource consumption for future AI systems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h1h8c3q7q0hzhnxq45fzgwww)) ^537925787