259 - real stupidity beats artificial intelligence all the time 🤖🧠
Hey there, !
I've had some very fun conversations with friends in recent times about AI - especially as we start to use AI a lot more; it's on our phones, it's in our computers, it's writing VCAA exams (maybe?). I mean, did you see the Tesla ones?
For me, the headscratchers were sparked more from the question of 'what would these AI need to be to pass as human?" and essentially, when would they replace us?
As with any of these questions, the actual question trying to be solved is "what does it mean to be human?" And though philosophy and more academic methods have tried to solve this before (e.g. with the Chinese Room experiment and the Turing test, I think that fiction is a great way to investigate these questions as well.
The joy of reading a lot of sci-fi when I was young (and still loving it) is the weird and wonderful ideas of what AI could be, and the different ways that authors have anticipated how humans will interact with them. For example:
- The Bicentennial Man / The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov (also a movie starring Robin Williams): a wonderful novelette (that turned into a novel that turned into a movie) that tries to blur the lines between robots and humans as much as possible; with a robot that willingly and consciously converts themselves to adopt human-like functions - adding organs like a stomach and digestive system (including a poop chute lol), starts wearing clothes, buys his own freedom from his master, converts his body into an android one (so it's more human-like) until he ultimately asks to have his brain decay over time, taking away his immortality (which is when he is accepted as 'The Bicentennial Man').
- The whole short story Robot series from Isaac Asimov and the Three Laws are fantastically written - and written in a way that shows how flexibility in robotics would be difficult to implement (as every short story shows there are issues with the Three Laws themselves!) - this was also popularised by I, Robot starring Will Smith.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (also made into a movie - Blade Runner) explores what it means to be human - and whether replicants or androids that are based on humanity are close enough to copy humanity.
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - a fascinating sci-fi book which is more about 'what if evolution happened to other creatures', but the AI that is created here is more about a human consciousness, and there are some situations where that consciousness needs a human brain to re-experience what it means to be human. It's again a very interesting construction on an AI that is built on a human template, rather than something that is out of our control.
Is the core of humanity about the ability to think? the ability for creativity? and/or the ability to die?
What does each of these things mean, anyway? What does thinking mean? What is consciousness? Is more thinking units equal to more intelligence? Is more combinations of the past equal to more creativity?
I mean also, the ultimate instantiation of intelligence, if there is some super-evolved version of it, might not look human - but is that okay? Wouldn't that be great to see?
I'm optimistic that there's always going to be a role for humanity on the fringes of thinking - to be able to adapt ideas from one modality to another that robots can't necessarily anticipate; especially things that can't always be learnt by looking at our histories.
I mean, humans are fuzzy creatures - we aren't robots that have everything worked out exactly to a T:
- "I'll be there in 5 minutes" can range anywhere from "right now" to "half an hour later" (if you're a DOG)(woof woof it's me).
- "I feel sad" can range from "I feel sad that my snack was sold out at the store" to "The light has gone out of my life".
- "I'll eat healthy" can range from "fruits and veg only" to "I'll just eat a medium Maccas meal instead of a large one".
How can you size up your happiness? How do you count your sadness? How can you measure your love?
As the great Terry Pratchett put it:
“Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.” - Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Any attempts for us to try and apply rules stringently and without mercy is something that even our courts try to deal with in equity - to be fair and just may not just be following the rules to their letter, but perhaps in their spirit as well.
I fervently hope that this domain, the fuzzy one, that is, stays a human one.
Maybe there's still a chance for us yet, ey?
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Tokyo Story - 4 stars - a wonderful old Japanese movie from 1953 by Yasujiro Ozu, who seems to be able to find such universal human truths and show them on film. Genuinely through these last few weeks, I reckon a lot of the world can be explained or experienced by watching slice-of-life Japanese films from the 50s and 60s :D This one is about elderly parents from the countryside coming into Tokyo to come and see their kids, who are busy and don't have time for them; on the contrary, it is a daughter-in-law, not blood related, who seems to treat them the kindest. It's 4 stars, but I think I really want to rewatch this later on in my life to see how I might empathise more with the kids, or the parents. Recommended!
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Flinders Waffles - a nice place next to Pidapipo on Degraves St, and near Flinders St. They have dorayaki in the shape of the Flinders St station, and also some fun soft serve flavours (like mango and melon). It's mainly the instagrammable part which gets people - the actual eating is a bit messy - but it's good nonetheless!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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MomBoard - another really lovely breakdown of an e-ink display for an old mum with amnesia. I love to see technology being used in these kinds of ways.
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The Network of Time - kind of like working out degrees of separation, but algorithmically!
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Security is a useless controls problem - a good analogy on why the Internet is full of chimpanzees, or more importantly, why we often follow rules that no-one seems to adequately explain other than "we've always done it like this".