Determinism, non-determinism and the present times …

#AI seems to be the hype word of the day, and with it come back light some old but new again concepts.

Ever since digital computing became predominant, we became hooked to it’s clear and deterministic approach. We are hooked on high precision, on quantified levels, on all sort of representations that offer an illusion of precision. I believe many of us tend to not question the precision of all these measurements bombarding us during each moment of the day.

A while ago I was speaking at some software testing conferences, and one topic I liked to present was about new types of interfaces, and around 2019, these next-gen interfaces were voice based. Alexa and Google Home were raging and were the high-hope kids. One aspect I observed during the time spent testing such interfaces was that things are not what they seem, and that non-determinism needs to be embraced once more. (if you like, the good friends of Ministry of Testing have a public session – https://www.ministryoftesting.com/testbash-sessions/voice-is-a-new-frontier-testing-next-generation-interfaces-lucian-adrian-stroie).

Back to the point, AI is non deterministic at the interaction edge, the prompts and the replies vary a lot and I find it funny how “advanced prompting techniques” advocate for “bite sized prompts”. It seems refreshing having this lesson once more presented, as at least this contact with non-deterministic tech might force us to come back from the digitally induced deterministic hook-up. It will for sure help human interactions, as we humans are also non-deterministic in the way we interact, we speak and we transmit information.

It feels we are coming to a full circle, started with human communication (messy and non-deterministic), then digitized & deterministic and now back to #AI driven communication that is again non-deterministic.

Embrace uncertainty, embrace analogue, admit quantization and communication noise, admit encoding as a lossy process and we will be more comfortable with #ai, while also paradoxically better prepared to deal with it.