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Outline (v. 2), shoot for <1500 words

  1. Hello and intro remarks. Not really needed. (super brief - 0 to 100 words)

  2. Rule-Following (200 words)

    1. in Christianity:
      1. biographical: CCM, Stephen Curtis Chapman Song “Who Makes the Rules?”
      2. the Law
    2. in AI: Expert Systems
      1. biographical: my Latin Tutor program. .. June AEID conference London
      2. started in 50’s, formalized 1965 (Minsky)… “In the 1980s, expert systems proliferated.” [1] downside: knowledge acquisition

    …Segue: both these rule-based [systems] suffered from defects, e.g. high hopes of automatic law failed utterly… And so,….

  3. Transitions to ‘Inferred Rules’ (longer, 500 words)

    1. in Christianity:
      1. Holy Spirit instead of Law, law written on our hearts,
      2. 12 Step “intuitively know how to handle situations which formerly used to baffle us”
      3. Explainability: CCM Newsboys song “Spirit Thing”: “it’s just a little hard to explain”
    2. in AI: Machine Learning
      1. talk about what ML is… mention TF tutorial [2]
      2. Explainability: models too complicated. issues re. transparency, textures, adv. attacks
      3. In fact, it’s even harder to tell what the rules are b/c of supply chain problem [3]. crowdsourced datasets, turkers, serfs. who labels these? my NLP experience [4]

    …Segue: Thus we see that rules are now ‘made’ in a different sense: in the sense of being products of a lengthy build process. Who has the means to enact these?

  4. Cultural Dissonance (medium length 500 words)

    1. previous point flows right into (note flipping the Christian/AI order here): ML systems and cultural biases:
      1. sentiment analysis, example of tweets [4] but could be movie reviews [5]. Also word vectors [6–7], Amazon hiring…
      2. Some of this due to datasets but not all, Lecun/Gebru [8]
      3. Inevitable conflicts? Sargeant [9]
        1. Note that content mod is a big thing right now. (maybe save for next section)
    2. Something Christians & culture and pluaralism… mention MacIntyre? [10] Virtue ethics…blah?

  5. Moving Forward (medium-short 400 words)

    1. (previous point flows into (again flipping order)): Christianity –> ML
      1. work against bias that hurts people. celebrate diversity. be ethical voices, cite Anaconda survey
      2. One big area of concern: content moderation, in light of cultural dissonance. Note Facebook workers censoring trump, Worship leader getting blocked
      3. note Christians not included re. “representation” but can try to be. Note Black researchers have been doing great work in this area, e.g. [11]. Few Christian voices, notably sociologist George Yancey (missing reference).
    2. ML –> Christianity (metaphors)
      1. training/renewing our mind, beholding christ, etc. virtues as habits (spiritual disciplines) via reading scripture, prayer meditation
      2. unlike Amazon, by faith we infer based on not our past history but ideally? record of Bible as dataset, we choose to infer based on a model of the world we want rather than the world we have?
      3. Spirit can reset our weights (transfer learning!) inner healing “this is not that”

  6. And closing remark or two. (super brief, 50 words)

    1. Maybe the Salt & Light angle: People like me need to not become so techy & embedded in secular thinking that we have nothing to offer but a carnal Christian-culture-flavored version of the world’s methodologies.

  7. References (200 words)

Lingering question(s): is my “…ML…is similar to Xianity…” comparison a ‘real thing’ or just a rhetorical trick?

References