George,

Your points are well taken, especially wrt computation being used to create art, music, or literature.

My own interests, though, are to use computation as a tool to study the humanities. My K-12 experience with history was as you described, and now with some years of experience in the real world I appreciate much better the need to study the motivation behind historical events and the trajectory of events and people that led up to the event of interest.

I liken the use of computation to help inform the study of the humanities much like that of a magnifying glass, microscope, electron microscope, ... making it possible to observe biology in every greater detail. I will still use my own mind to make conjectures and draw conclusions. The Eureka! moments are rare, but all the more rewarding because I was the one connecting the dots the algorithm helped me find.

Bob

Thanks for the references.

The afterward to Lakoff and Johnson's book contains a short discussion of a new viewpoint: a Neural Theory of Language. There are some references that are a bit old in such a rapidly evolving field, but I will check them out.

I think that one problem, particularly for people like me doing unfunded explorations, is that the dictionary (word list) in Wolfram Language is too wimpy for anything more involved than "bag of words" computations. I found that the first edition of the OED is out of copyright, and there are PDF scans of the 20 volumes, but extracting the words into something useful is simply too big a task for one person. (The scans are not that sharp, so the error rate would be too hight to accurately automate, in my opinion.) It would be great if Oxford University Press would license the OED to Wolfram, but I doubt that that would happen. It might be possible to cobble something analogous to the usage quotes in the dictionary by using all the out-of-copyright literature that is already in plain text, but I suspect that there would need to be expert curation.

My suspicion is that this will be best another stage in the development of AI. Great things were promised, followed by running into hardware (and possibly conceptual) limitations, which resulted in stasis until the next breakthrough. I am not sure that the current hardware can do a decent job using an 800,000 entry dictionary with the type of added information that the OED has.

The main downside to this is that people may make commercial use of the fruits of the current state of NLP and not realize its (severe) limitations.

Right now, this problem is on the back-burner for me until I can find an economical way to use a GPU to do Neural Nets on macOS.

Fair enough, and I was using "understand" metaphorically.

What I see happening, though, is that events (not problems, as such, really) are being redefined so that the new shiny tools can be applied to it. Even though positivism is not the strong influence it was mid-century, it is still around.

So what we are seeing, in my opinion, is that the Machine Learning is becoming sophisticated in handling an impoverished problem. It is one of the ways cargo cult science evolves from real inquiry.

The humanities people, for the most part, will see right through this.

For what it's worth, my talk was popular with a small set of conference attendees, all (?) of whom had some connection with the arts and humanities, in addition to being Mathematica users. For the rest of the conference, these ideas are pretty much below the RADAR.

It's really too bad, because I can see that the STEM people really need the help of the humanities if they are to avoid pursuing blind alleys.

George, I wonder how your concerns can be addressed by the Cyc Project run by Doug Lenat of Cycorp (www.cyc.com) -- the longest continuously running project in AI? Stephan and Doug worked together when they were younger. Stephan said some years ago that before Alpha was announced, he connected with Doug to say that Alpha wasn't intruding upon Cyc's turf. Doug gave a thumbs up to Alpha.

The Cyc Project's goal is to endow automated reasoning with common sense. It splits human knowledge into diverse microtheories, each equipped with the modes of reasoning, discussion, idioms, etc. of that particular area of knowledge. There's a microtheory for mathematics, religion, organizations, physics, chemistry, fantasy, etc. His experts range from historians to mathematicians to comp scientists to Airborne Rangers. I wonder how this content could be tapped by Alpha (it may be worth asking Wolfram if they've investigated any potential WL-Cyc "collaboration").

Bob, we share a common perspective on history. I've started working on a WTC2019 presentation that discusses cliometrics (the mathematical modeling of history) -- let's see if the abstract flies. As you may recall from his WTC2017 talk, Kuba Kabala (Davidson College) does textual analyses (using WL) of documents from the medieval papacy. Hopefully he'll have another blockbuster for WTC2019 (Kuba, you still have an open invitation to talk to the Washington DC-Area Mathematica Special Interest Group when it relaunches at The Catholic University of America in the Spring).