Apple Intelligence: These Bots Can't Reason and "Possibly" Never Will: Part 3

“It is obvious that there are some things of which the outcome is not uniform or determined, and it is in such cases that chance or spontaneity finds its sphere.”-Aristotle

Randomness is an obsession and features strongly in dark play.

I mentioned that things have been quiet over here due to my health leave of absence, during which an old friend of mine died.

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about the strange way we are pretending that LLMs can't reason is news and Gary Marcus became the most cited voice in the media about it.

In thinking about how we arrived at a place where intelligent people believed (or pretended to believe) that LLMs ware agentic reasoners, or could be trained to do so, I have been researching and writing about the history of math, science, and computers, and its overlap with cult behaviors and a belief in forecasting and predictions. As part of that, I have been reading and writing about randomness, chance, "stochastic" systems, and how our brain handles them. All of this is couched by an interruption in my research where something "unexpected" developed in my health (and so far unexplained).

Let me get back to my my friend who passed, whom I will call Jason.

I hadn't seen him in over a decade.

On Friday, September 13, he and his physician wife, Arya, a two-time Ivy League grad, physician, and math phenom, lay in bed like the spoons in a drawer they've been for three decades and a blood clot lodged in a lung artery and killed him instantly.When I spoke to a mutual friend, also a highly trained medical specialist and math-nerd, she said:

"It's not probable. It's very unlikely. Usually, the pain and symptoms are obvious, and his wife would have recognized the symptoms. But 25% of the time a PE kills people instantly. He was unlucky. We were all unlucky. He died in the arms of a doctor with the skill and the love to have saved him, easily. So unlucky."

Jason and I were not sweethearts, we were each other's wing person; I don't know which was Maverick and which was Goose; both of us were pretty dorky. When he met Arya, who played a clarinet and wore braces (in case our nerd bona fides still don't register and you needed another detail), I was his romance strategist and private chauffeur, like Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful. Replace her unrequited love with an unrequited need for this brilliant red-headed geek who was really good at math and physics to get the girl in the end. Because that's how I wanted all the nerd stories to end. Ducky should have gotten Andi. That's why Wonderful is the better film. I will die on this hill.

That's the kind of friends we were. In a way, we were too mature for high schoolers, which made things harder. Teen life is hard, but when you have the IQ and hard knocks to see it in perspective as you endure it, it can rub you a little raw. So we were life raft friends. You jump, I jump. Keep breathing. I got you. I see you. You need each other. Then life happens. You drift, move on, but catch up every now and then. You remember that the other helped you survive.

So here are the odd things that happened. I talked all about him all night for the first time in 10 years the night that he died in his sleep. This sounds so twee, I kind of can't stand it. However, I have witnesses. I was feverish and sick and texted a friend to keep me company and she and I started dreaming up a writing retreat for artists. On a whim, I suggested she look into the place where Jason and I became friends: a camp we attended every summer, fall, and spring, for religious leadership development. It was a beautiful rustic place on the ocean that had woods and mountains, cliffs and beach.

I told her some of the funny stories from our exploits there, like the time we played hide and seek and Jason's brother dislocated his arms from the sockets on purpose to fit into a small space in a drop ceiling. I went to sleep and dreamed those lucid dreams the feverish have. We were all back there, at the campsite, and Michael Landon was the new camp director. Landon kept close to me and sat beside me wherever I went. I kept asking him why he pretended to the world he was dead, and he smiled and winked an said, "didn't you see Highway to Heaven? I'm not a man. I'm an angel."

Jason was a cynic, and I literally woke up guffawing. Michael Landon is an example of something he would mock endlessly and he thought I was bit of a sentimentalist at times. I am unapologetically sappy. It's true. He was not on FB but I talked to his sister a couple of times a year on there, I thought I have to ask for his phone number. So I reached for my phone to open FB.

Because of my fever and my illness, it was late in the morning, almost noon. I rolled over and took my phone off the charger and opened FB. To the crucial point, especially in times of heightened emotion, algorithms can seem to know your thoughts. We like coincidences. We like ascribing meanings to randmoness and finding patterns, even when they aren't there. We don't accept the haphazard.

Who knows why it was the first thing in my feed? Maybe my phone recorded the times I said the camp name and the times I said Jason's name. Maybe I was just connected enough to his sister in that way for the algorithm to know I'd want to see it. All I know is, the first thing I saw was the announcement that he had died.

Then, it said he was being buried out of the church I was married in 24 years ago, a fact that confused me at first and took me a day or two to comprehend. I kept returning to read it and looking at the backs of my hands because I thought, "I must still be dreaming." We grew up together in one state. Why is he being buried in a different state, a couple of hundreds of miles away from where we grew up? It turned out he and Arya had settled there. His home is walking distance from where my parents lived for 10 years and where I sometimes lived between NYC apartments. His wife now owns the medical practice I used to work for as an IT consultant. Strange.

But here is perhaps the strangest thing of all. What we used to talk about the few times we talked as grown ass humans.

Risk. Chance. Probabilities. Predictions.

Jason was an insurance executive who calculated the odds of people dying for a living.