People matter because they tell how a thing that does not exist in nature is related to other things. Unfortunately, data tend to overshadow people.1 Telling how a thing is related to other things is mapping. Mapping things that exist in nature such as tomato plants often involves gene mapping.2 Genes are a natural starting point that may be used to study how a tomato plant relates to its environment. There is no natural starting point in artificial intelligence: people have to decide what the relevant data are and how to process them. They may also decide to produce data by considering what exists in nature and then process these data with their infrastructure.
There is no such thing as data without infrastructure since there is no product without tools that have been designed to make it. These tools have been designed by a person who had potential products in mind. When it comes to software, the connection between tools and data is irrelevant because software is used anytime and anywhere possible. The fact that the initial piece of code has been designed to produce specific products is loosely related to the fact that someone has managed to use it to achieve a different purpose. This loose connection between the product and the tool that has been used to produce it is very important in practice because it makes software hacking possible.3 Software can be used not only to produce data but also to change the piece of software that has been used to produce them whereas one cannot use mainly genes to modify genes.
Software changes the way we consider things: a heavy infrastructure can be used to produce data about natural things that are then processed not as natural things but as data. These pieces of data may be used to figure out what can be done and even to conquer adjacent markets.3 Exploring the world of tomato plants through data requires to know what the relevant connections between data and a given tomato plant are. This involves moving back and forth checking whether these connections do not become too loose or too tight over time.4 Moving back and forth is uncommon among legal practitioners and is a practical way to try things out or to search graphs.
In brief, moving back and forth is a way to open new paths.
-
Chaudhary, Juhi, Alisha Alisha, Vacha Bhatt, Sonali Chandanshive, Nirbhay Kumar, Zahoor Mir, Ashwini Kumar, Satish K. Yadav, S. M. Shivaraj, Humira Sonah, and et al. 2019. "Mutation Breeding in Tomato: Advances, Applicability and Challenges" Plants 8, no. 5: 128. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants8050128, §3. ↩
-
See Heavy and soft, especially §2. ↩↩