"Ideas in the pipeline," and waiting for words to express them is pretty good, Uncle Ken. Sometimes the pipeline gets clogged, which is a completely different problem to deal with but I'm working on it.
Letting the mind wander can be useful for some types of problem solving but it can also be a trap, leading to an inability to focus. It's like when you walk into a room and ask yourself,"What am I looking for?" or "Why did I come here?" It happens to all of us, our inner monologues forget the topic of conversation. But I digress...
Since I'm not up to date with the state of the art of AI, I'm guessing that it involves more than number crunching or sorting. As a machine, it simply follows instructions but I've read that they are now developing their own instructions, or algorithms. But they can't start from nothing, can they? They need input of some kind and have to be taught once they are turned on. The old adage "garbage in, garbage out" still holds true. The best AI in the world will give a bogus answer if given bum data but so do humans, we do it all the time. But humans can also draw conclusions about the data, make decisions, and arrive at reasonable solutions to a problem. Maybe the most successful AIs are the ones that let their little machine minds wander.
I've mentioned the chess playing AI and the Chinese facial recognition AI, but I don't know if that's all they can do and are one-trick ponies. Can the chess AI play other games, or invent new ones? I'm starting to suspect that AIs aren't really intelligent but are able to develop more efficient methods of doing the same old stuff; it's still all ones and zeroes to them and they are far from developing what we sacks of meat refer to as consciousness. As Uncle Ken stated, "You have to be alive." And machines can be as easily duped as humans, so it will be an interesting ride.
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Mr Beagles mentioned muscle memory but what I think he meant is actually proprioception, one of our senses like balance. You know how you can close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose? That's proprioception. We use it all the time without knowing it, especially when you have to scratch an itch. You never have to poke and prod, you know exactly where that itch is without looking.
Stuff like this makes me think that there may be something to Intelligent Design, creator unknown. Life on this planet is a little too neat and tidy, despite it's diversity. Why do all mammals have four limbs, two eyes, and one nose? Even if humans lack tails, we still have tailbones. It's like all life follows the same rough template, but even then, it's odd to me that humans have a much smaller genome than many plants and animals. Weird, I tell you.
I don't think we're close to decoding the human genome yet, and a lot of the so-called junk DNA may not be junk after all. There is some long dormant bacteria in the permafrost that is being released due to climate change, and that junk DNA may save our sorry asses. Or maybe we'll grow prehensile tails instead.
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Remember this time a year ago when we were confounded by the election results? Some of us were cautiously optimistic, reckoning that things won't be too bad and the responsibilities of the presidency will force the man to rise to the occasion. How foolish I was! And yet the economy is booming, unemployment is down, and I still feel like it's a sham, the bubble will burst, and this peculiar reality we are sharing will come to an end. Maybe the increasing legalization of reefer is a sneaky plot to keep the masses in a stupor so they'll just sit around munching Doritos and watching TV while big business and the government have their way. If the powers-that-be really wanted to put the country back to work they'd legalize meth. It almost worked for the Germans in the middle of the last century. Or so I've read; they knew their drugs. But the Allies had a lot of good pills too, so maybe it made no difference in the end.
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