Mimicking a Neural Network–an exercise in Intelligent Design?

I’ve come across an interesting article in the Journal of Cyber Security and Information Systems at https://www.csiac.org/journal-article/enduring-fleeting-future-a-brief-overview-of-current-sentiment-and-emotional-analysis-a-look-forward/, with the interesting — and just a bit scary — title “Enduring, Fleeting, Future: A brief overview of current sentiment and emotional analysis, a look forward.” This article appears to make the case for researchers seeking out designs in nature in order to design and build “people designed” capabilities of a similar sort. In this case, the problem being targeted is Artificial Intelligence (AI), seeking to recognize and identify particular human emotions of sentiment and emotion, as well as, I suppose, identify one particular face among the many billions of faces throughout the world.

In terms of human emotion, the focus will be on the seven universal emotions identified as: joy, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and contempt.

For human sentiment, the following Merriam-Webster Dictionary seem to apply; a : an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling : predilection or b : a specific view or notion : opinion.

Pretty scary stuff, and that’s perhaps why this article shows up in a journal dealing with Cyber Security.
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This article brought to mind an article I wrote a few years back; “I’ve grown accustomed to your face”, about the amazing capability of humans to recognize a face in a crowded room. This capability is further augmented by a similar capacity to recognize particular voices among many. The paper was promoted to “headline” status at the Intelligent design site https://uncommondescent.com/
I have a 50+ year old degree in mathematics, and no knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, but I was able to read the article and get the gist of what was being said. It seems the article can be summed up by the following three pictures:

First is a schematic of an actual neuron. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons in a typical healthy human. For an earth’s population of some 7.5 billion, that’s a lot of neurons that have to work in order for all those kids to catch a view of mom’s dreaded “look.”

The second picture is a schematic of something called a Multilayer Feed-Forward Neural Network.  In the context of the article, this seems to be a human created primitive neuron wannabe.

The third picture represents the various stages that take a “convolutional neural network” through the processes of picking out Sara in that crowded room.

The article is filled with technical design jargon, mathematics and whatever. Not once is the term Intelligent  Design seen. Likewise, the term evolution does not show up. However, what I as a layman see very clearly as the underlying design assumption, is an amazing device – designed, engineered and manufactured by a mind far beyond any of us mortal humans.

Take another look at that second picture above, and for the two mathematical functions, substitute your favorite random number generator. What do you expect to see as output on the right side of the  box.

It would seem Darwin got it wrong.

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I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Psalm 139:14

Don Johnson – August 2018