[Fis] Contingency signals: AI Information, Decision and Learning

[Mark Johnson]

Dear all,

A group of colleagues and I have been working on diagnostic AI for some
years  using a comparison technique. A few of us just published this paper
on the inter-relationship between management decision making, the learning
of decision-making and technology: Developing judgement for business: an
AI-based model of independent management learning - ScienceDirect
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296325006654__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WPhKwNIaSyPehSx-1rv1IXkLmAKWvfhjcSoF8ycbMGpQLKjNmUeRHbMR7LBpcGoUSKLBgkQAwLAnZMgvKms0B4w$ >

The role of information in this is obviously crucial - as is the criticism
of AI that it is an unreliable assistant. How might AI tell us when it's
not sure about things? While Shannon's H is a kind of contingency signal,
it is curious how with AI this aspect of mathematical information theory is
easily forgotten! However, there does seem to be an intersection between
the way information is conceived and effective social decision-making where:

a. information is framed in terms of varying degrees of contingency
b. good decision concerns the effective allocation of scarce human
expertise to maximise organisational effectiveness

In essence, the greater the contingency in a judgement, the greater the
need to allocate human resource to debate choices; the less the
contingency, the less the need for humans in decision processes.

The fundamental message is a management cybernetic one (i.e. Stafford Beer)
- it is not what the technology itself does, it is how we organise
ourselves with it that matters.

The technique in the paper illustrates a way in which degrees of
contingency in decision-making can be identified by the technology. It is,
we would suggest, this signal which we need from our technology, not an
"answer" to questions. So the pursuit of "answer engines" (as Google and
others are discussing) is barking up the wrong tree.

A deeper question is whether some kind of "contingency signal" lies at the
heart of biological information itself. This would have resonance with
deeper cybernetic ideas about contingency (Luhmann, Leydesdorff, Shannon,
etc) and cellular organisation (Torday and colleagues, Levin, etc) -
whether a biological "contingency signal" is produced in the gap between
the internal biological selection process of a cell (referencing its
evolutionary history acquired through symbiogenesis, for example) and
external selection pressure.

Any thoughts?

Best wishes,

Mark
-- 
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
University of Manchester

Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
University of Liverpool
Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WPhKwNIaSyPehSx-1rv1IXkLmAKWvfhjcSoF8ycbMGpQLKjNmUeRHbMR7LBpcGoUSKLBgkQAwLAnZMgv378sKxM$ 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20251120/8095b36c/attachment.html>