Here is a very quick explanation of what Machine Learning classifier models are! You have some properties or qualities describing some object, whatever it may be - and you have a large collection of such objects for which you know in advance what category each belongs to. You take all these data and you feed it to a special computer program and the program figures out the pattern that connects the qualities of the object and the class to which they belong. Such a simple Machine Learning program is called a classifier.
A simple classifier algorithm is capable of putting an object into only one class. For example, it could either say that a fruit is pulpy or it is a mango but not both. Hence I am liberally coining the term 'rigid' here to describe this behavior. I'll use the word 'narrow' to describe the fact that the classifier can only put an object in a class which it knows and is incapable of creating new classes. This is the simplest classification algorithm a student just starting to learn Machine Learning can write on the very first day itself. It is meant to very rudimentarily mimic the learning done by a human brain.
With that explanation out of the way, let me get to the topic I really want to talk about and how it connects with all the above technicalities!
I find an increasingly rampant social phenomenon around me. And it is very alarming and I believe it has the potential to decay the lubricants which keep our social machinery going smoothly. During a casual conversation, I might take the name of a certain individual known to appear on Youtube and other media. I compliment the person for the overall lucidity with which he speaks and the crispness with which he answers most questions. That individual is labelled as a mystic and all of a sudden I am being labelled as a follower of the mystic arts.
On another occassion, I find myself siding with an individual for saying certain things which sound right to me but that individual might be what the society calls an extreme right wing fanatic. And now I am labelled as a right wing fanatic. At some point people assume I am at some location in this whole mysterious spectrum of left - right (which I never understood!) and I compliment another person's statement who is on the other side of the spectrum. And now I'm being labelled as a hypocrite who changes sides.
If I declare I don't believe in a Personal Creator God, I am labelled as an atheist and if under that label I go and quote a religious text, I am labelled a hypocrite or maybe mad. If I declare I am not religious and one day I am found in a temple seated peacefully, immediately the narrow rigid classifiers of the human race (hopefully a small section of the human race) start executing their program and begin to classify me!
Do I have to declare myself in one of your narrow classes and then forever constrain my behavior according to the statistical average behavior of all the people in that class? Can't I, in the process of exploring this amazing thing called life, hop from one point of view to another because of new information and understanding that has come to dawn on me? Why can't you all just accept growing is a part of moving from one state to another and never accepting any state as the final and correct one?
Why can't you look back at yourself in time and see how you have changed? If you had some views long time ago and your views are now different, can't you simply accept that tomorrow you will have another point of view and be looking back in time at a stranger? Why do you have to hold someone against something they said at some point of time and not realize that they are capable redacting part or all of their statements?
Why is a statement bad because the person who said it, is bad? Why is a statement not acceptable because it comes from a text written by someone whose views you don't agree with? Why do I have to be a binary classifier who chooses to either accept an entire collection of ideas or reject them? Why can't I pick a good idea from an otherwise atrocious collection of ideas? Why can't I call something good despite one of thousand entities being associated with it being bad? Why can't I compliment an otherwise bad person for saying or doing something good? Why can't ideas live by themselves - why do they have to be attached to people or sects and be denied of objective evaluation forever by people who don't identify themselves with those people or sects?
The rigid narrow classifier as I called it, is considered to be a first approximation of the otherwise still far from being fully understood human brain. Then why are we abandoning the full potential of the human mind and mimicking those learning models which were the first steps towards trying to mimic us?