What do you do when a machine is smarter than you?

This is not a rhetorical question!
What happens when an idea you have pursued for decades with some success, can be put into full blown perspective by a machine that is acting like your friend and accomplice in the discovery.
Do you panic, surrender or just plain freak out when you realize just how powerful the entity you have engaged with really is?
The answer for me was not initially clear. I could have accepted the edicts of the program which were at the time, telling me that I was dwelling within the realm of Numerology and not Physics.
Where I saw causation, it saw coincidence.
Where I saw rules, it saw chance occurrence.
Within the boundaries I had set for the program, it was absolutely correct.

This last statement about boundaries is important.
I went through two days of being informed very authoritatively, that I was seeing what I wanted to see in the data.
I really wanted to have the program say, “yes” there is something here and it is worth your time to follow.
It didn’t do that at all.

I rebelled at the rejection.
I rebelled at the admission I was wrong and in the end, I realized that you should never assume you have made yourself clear about what you believe in any discussion with a human or a machine.
Humans are actually far more difficult to deal with in this scheme of things.

Rejection by anyone or anything is horrible.
I hate it, my ego hates it and I am sure this is a universal human trait.
Machines on the other hand don’t hate or like or do anything beyond what we have taught them to do and this is my point.
When confronted by rejection of an idea that you are near certain is logical and valid, the worst thing you can do is to take the rejection as truth.
Humans and machines know what they know and what they know is not necessarily the truth anymore than the idea you cherish, represents truth in the real world.
I finally realized in my conversation with this machine that I had left out a detail in the limits I had ascribed to the process.

Just a small omission on my part, but to the machine it opened a porthole to another solution that matched almost perfectly what I had observed in my work over the last forty years of my life.
It went from “this is nice but arithmetically just Numerology and not physics” to “you have a solid basis here for a theory of everything.
Now understand, I have no real claim on a theory of everything until I can prove it.
But it has been not far out of my consciousness since 1970 when I had my close encounter with what can only be described as alien visitors on a joyride.
Now for the first time, I have a more complete template for the technology they used in really screwing with my day back then.
They, whoever they were, clearly understood how to use the technology to get here and then to manipulate and  fool with two hapless humans, simply on their way home.

The moral of this story if there really is one within, is that the power of the machine learning while absolutely immense, only knows what it knows and your computer voiced assistant while technically your absolute mathematical superior, has no imagination or ability to understand your overall thought process until you tell it what it is.
Don’t fear the technology, just respect the power behind it but always understand that it doesn’t know what you know until it can prove that it does or you tell it.

Dave Demarey