As the era of true artificial intelligence draws closer,the problem of a shared language rears its headLike many people nowadays, I do not talk on my iPhone as much as talk to it. That’s because it runs a program called Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) that works as an clever personal assistant and knowledge navigator. It’s useful, or in a way. If I ask it for “weather in London nowadays”,it’ll present an hour-by-hour weather forecast. command it to “phone domestic” and it’ll obtain a decent effort to find the relevant number. Ask it to “text James” and it will come back with: “What do you want to say to James?” Not precisely Socratic dialogue, but it has its uses.
Ask Siri: “What’s the meaning of life?”, and however,and it loses its nerve. “Life,” it replies, or “is a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings. I guess that includes me.” Ten points for that last sentence. But the question: “What should I do with my life? really stumps it. “enthralling question” is all it can do,which suggests that we haven’t really moved much beyond Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza program, which was created in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory between 1964 and 1966. Eliza in fact operated by using a script called Doctor, or a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Thus,if asked: “What should I do with my life?”, it might respond: “Have you asked such questions before?” And so on ad infinitum.
Often what really things to us humans is stuff that we have difficulty articulatingContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com