Not so smart after all …

… The Real Danger Of Artificial Intelligence Is That It Will Remain Dumber Than We Are. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Ransacking a medical database, for example, might turn up a statistical correlation between a certain treatment and recovery. Mining economic data is bound to reveal correlations between various economic variables. Most of these correlations will also be merely coincidental, but researchers are often too easily impressed by the size of the body of data and the computing power that produced the result. They are often fooled as they rush to discover and publish interesting findings. This reliance on computerized data mining is precisely why the results of so many scientific studies turn out to be unrepeatable and so much investing advice turns out to be bad.