Robert J. Marks II

Robert J. Marks Ph.D. is Senior Fellow and Director of the Bradley Center and is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. Marks is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). He was the former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and is the current Editor-in-Chief of BIO-Complexity. Marks is author of the books Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will Never Do and The Case For Killer Robots. He is co-author of the books For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley, Neural Smithing: Supervised Learning in Feedforward Artificial Neural Networks and Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. For more information, see Dr. Marks’s expanded bio.

Archives

The Asbury Revival and the Cure for TikTok

_{In the age of social media addiction, young people need to know they can be imperfect and yet loved}_{Robert J. Marks
February 21, 2023}

Social media portrays a world where everybody is happy and having a good time. Everybody, of course, except for you. There must therefore be something wrong with you. You are a loser. Teenage boys without girlfriends feel like social freaks. One in three teenage girls who use social media suffers from body image issues Social Media and Depression Young adults who use social media are three times as likely to suffer from depression. Depression can lead to suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, female suicides aged 15-24 increased by 87 percent over the past 20 years and male suicides increased by 30 percent. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry says suicide is now Read More ›

Artificial Intelligence and the Love of Jesus

_{The "He Gets Us" video ends with the declaration "Jesus' love was never artificial"}_{Robert J. Marks
February 13, 2023}

How does artificial intelligence deal with the teachings of Jesus Christ? Apparently quite well in some cases. Super Bowl ads this year included two about Jesus from the ministry He Gets Us. There are more thought-provoking videos at their web site HeGetsUs.com. One, linked here, is about AI. An artificial intelligence image synthesizer Midjourney was asked by He Gets It to generate images about love from simple text prompts. The video shows generated images using software from the company Midjourney. When prompted to synthesize an image from the prompt “love”, the response was pictures containing hearts – the kind you might see on a cheesy valentine day’s card. Then the AI was asked to visualize love the way Read More ›

China Balloons, EMP’s and Bioweapons: A Chilling Possibility

_{One nuclear burst 250 miles above Kansas could damage most of the power grid}_{Robert J. Marks
February 13, 2023}

No one has mentioned that the China balloon recently shot down after sailing across the United States could have been weaponized with a bomb or bioweapons. Thankfully, it was not. A single nuclear burst 250 miles above Kansas could destabilize much if not most of the US power grid. Almost the entire country, as well as parts of Mexico and Canada, would be affected by the resulting EMP (electromagnetic pulse). 250 miles above the Earth is about as high as the US Space Station is from Earth. Potential military threats from outer space was a prime motivation for creating the United States Space Force in 2019. The China balloon was not 250 miles up required for a coast-to-coast EMP Read More ›

War With China: Who Will Win?

_{Has the United States lost its status of military superiority?}_{Robert J. Marks
February 3, 2023}

General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command and 50,000 US service members, said, “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight [China] in 2025.” China’s invasion of Taiwan might spark this war. Predictably, the politically obedient Department of Defense (DOD) responded “comments [by Minihan] are not representative of the department’s view on China.” “Views” can be unimportant. Whether or not General Minihan is correct is important. Who would win the war between the US and China? Many are pessimistic about the chances of the United States being the victor. Here are short summaries (with links) of a few disturbing opinions from those who should know. So, how is the US doing? Here are some disturbing Read More ›

US Military Updates Autonomous Killer Robot Policy

_{Like it or not, properly vetted AI autonomous weapons are in the future of US adversaries and in ours as well}_{Robert J. Marks
January 30, 2023}

The Pentagon has updated its policy on the use of artificially intelligent autonomous weapons. Autonomous means the weapon can operate on its own without human oversight. As unpacked in my book, The Case for Killer Robots, technology wins wars and gives pause to potentially dangerous adversaries. This includes autonomous AI systems currently under development in the US, China and elsewhere. When there is an option, a human should be given oversight of the AI to avoid unexpected contingencies. But this is not always wise when (1) autonomy gives an overwhelming strategic advantage, (2) communication with remote AI is unwise or not possible, and (3) when events unfold faster than a human can respond. Imagine, for example, being attacked by a large swarm of armed drones. Read More ›

Note to Parents: Grooming and Wokeness Are Embedded in Chatbots

_{With or without tuning, all AI chatbots are biased one way or another. AI without bias is like water without wet}_{Robert J. Marks
January 11, 2023}

First impressions of a person can be wrong. Further interactions can reveal disturbing personality warts. Contrary to initial impressions, we might find out they lie, they are disturbingly woke, they can’t do simple math, their politics is on the extreme left, and they have no sense of humor or common sense. I have just described Open AI’s GPT3 chatbot, ChatGPT. Initially, users are gobsmacked by the its performance. Its flashy prose responses to simple queries look amazing. But become roommates with the chatbot for a few hours and its shortcomings become evident . It can’t get its facts straight, can’t do simple math problems, hates Donald Trump, and is being groomed to be “woke.” Its performance warts are so numerous that Bradley Center Senior Fellow Gary N. Smith hoists a Read More ›

How San Francisco’s Gun Fears Prevented Lifesaving Innovation

_{Killer robots in law enforcement would reduce the death toll but they are a bridge too far for many politicians}_{Robert J. Marks
January 6, 2023}

In November, 2022, San Francisco voted to allow police to deploy killer robots. Less than a month later, the city reversed their decision. Initially, in an 8-3 vote, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors allowed law enforcement to use robots “as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.” Sounds like reasonable policy, but protestors held up “NO KILLER ROBOTS!” signs at City Hall and the Board of Supervisors caved. This may be a case of hoplophobia, an irrational fear of firearms. So-called “killer robots” can deploy explosives to allow passage through blockaded doors or, in extreme situations, kill those who put innocent Read More ›

Celebrating My 2 Billionth Birth-Second: What Big Numbers Mean

_{Let’s see if we can give a clearer, sharper personality to these big numbers}_{Robert J. Marks
December 19, 2022}

I have lived for over two billion seconds. In 2013, I celebrated my 2 billionth birth-second. The party did not last long. Today US spending and deficits are going through the roof. References to billions and trillions of dollars of spending and deficit are everywhere. The late US Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois is purported to have said “A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” He said this in the middle of the last century. Today we can replace “billion” in Dirksen’s quote with “trillion.” Let’s see if we can give a clearer, sharper personality to these big numbers. A trillion is a thousand times bigger than a billion. If we scale a trillion Read More ›

Did the GPT3 Chatbot Pass the Lovelace Creativity Test?

_{The Lovelace Test determines whether the computer can think creatively. We found out…}_{Robert J. Marks
December 14, 2022}

The GPT-3 chatbot is awesome AI. Under the hood, GPT3 is a transformer model that uses sequence-to-sequence deep learning that can produce original text given an input sequence. In other words, GPT-3 is trained by using how words are positionally related. The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language is called syntax. Semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with the meanings of words. GPT-3 trains on the syntax of training data to learn and generate interesting responses to queries. This was the intent of the programmers. GPT-3 is not directly concerned with semantics. Given a tutorial on a topic from the web, for example, GPT-3 does not learn from the tutorial’s teaching, but only Read More ›

How Google’s LaMDA Resolved an Old Conflict in AI

_{Will two conflicting views always be in opposition? Or can they sometimes be resolved at a higher level?}_{Robert J. Marks
December 12, 2022}

In the movie Fiddler on the Roof there is a debate at one point. After listening to the cases made, a listener agrees with conclusions made from both sides of a conflict. Someone points out that “they can’t both be right!” to which the agreeable listener says “You know, you are also right.” Interestingly, the claim that the two sides of an issue will always be in opposition is not always true. The two sides can be in apparent conflict and both be right. Sometimes, but not always. The classic example is the blind men and the elephant. After feeling the elephant’s leg, one blind man says the elephant is like a tree. After feeling the elephant’s tail, another says the elephant Read More ›