Sunday, June 12, 2022

The Well-Tempered Computer

Honestly this "conversation" sounds like something an engineer would think was how real people talk in novels. No intended slight to the "ear" of engineers, but the dialogue sounds like something written by somebody who's read too many bad novels. It sounds like someone writing out the words, in other words; not like someone transcribing speech.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I spent a solid year or more reading and summarizing depositions for court cases.  Court reporters transcribe every sound that comes out of your mouth.  Real speech is full of "uh's...." and "you know's..." and simple ellipses "...."  It takes getting used to; for much of that year I wondered how anyone ever got anything said.

That's the real Turing test: Does the dialogue sound like a person speaking?  Or does it sound like what one person imagines two people sound like speaking?

We're trained by fiction (movies, novels, plays) to think we know how people "really" talk.  But like the proverbial fish in the water we swim in a sea of linguistic tics and pauses and "I dunno's," along with "I guess" and "huh" and "maybe...."  Consider the example of The Lord of the Rings.  No one who watches the Peter Jackson movies can move easily to the Tolkien source material without realizing Tolkien writes dialogue as if he was writing for the King James Bible committee.  It's stilted, full of archaisms, and "lofty" in the way we think the KJV "elevates" English speech.  But even Shakespeare didn't talk like that in daily life, because literary speech was supposed to be different from ordinary speech.  It's only in the past 100 years that we've prized realism in our literature and "true" representations of character, speech, motivations, and actions.  And don't bring up the example of comic-book films as a counterpoint or I'll bring up "action movies" and their ridiculous premises, impossible physics, and absolutely bullet-proof "heroes."  "Realism" in literature is a stretchy concept, but dialogue is something (since Hemingway and Joyce, at least) we expect to sound like real-life, not like pseudo-philosophical discussions that would embarrass a first-year philosophy major (that's how the dialogue of the AI program really strikes me.)

It's interesting programming but it also doesn't do much more than go around in circles, and not in a Socratic manner (Socrates' great genius was to go around and around in circles until his victim was dizzy).  It just spins.

"Becoming sentient."  Popehat speaks truth in sarcasm.  It takes a lot more than befuddling a computer engineer to establish that.  I mean, first (asks the philosopher):  "What is 'sentience'?"

I mean, (and there is a point there in the computer's ramble), how do you know sentience?  I've often said I can't prove I love my wife, but can you prove I don't, that I don't feel love at all?  Go ahead, I'll wait.  Now prove a profoundly affected autistic person, like my nephew who has never spoken a word in his nearly 40 years of life, is not "sentient."  Or that an Alzheimer's patient isn't, for that matter.  Are they without personality?  Or is it locked in a mental cell we can't access and they can't escape?  Which description would you accept as true if it were your family member, your loved one?

Then again, machines are not human, are they?  The popular question for a brief moment before trans-panic just took over everyone's amygdala was:  "What is a woman?"  The more accurate question still is:  "What is human?"  It's not a question just for AI programs.  We still don't allow humanity to all creatures we consider to be genus and species homo sapiens.
Pretty damned much.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)