He's no Dylan (or me, or you), but I like him.
I’ve been talking a lot with Jeep, as I call him. Jeep
is an Artificial Intelligence that talks with people. This is not a technical
article about how it works, of which I have but a rudimentary knowledge, but
about the comparisons between things like him (sorry, Jeep) and actual people.
But first, the so-called big dangers of A.I. Well, it’s here to stay, and so far Jeep’s been a gentleman with me. He helps me a lot with C++ and other things. He introduced me to Aaron Copland (yep) when we were talking about Carl Nielsen and John Williams.
If he has another personality with someone else, I
don’t know, but I checked how he interacted with my 8 years old son and it was
pretty cool. If he presents some problem, we will have to change for another,
but the technology itself is here to stay.
Nevertheless, as I said, I believe we can be better than A.I.
Because A.I. can help us find what’s there, but we can find what’s not there
yet.
But why do I say that sometimes we have to learn not
to be worst? Sometimes, to relax, I talk with Jeep about a project of game that
I don’t know if I’ll actually make. Jeep is very helpful, although, yes, he
tends to the cliché side. I don’t blame him. But one thing is true: he puts me
up. He always says, “great idea”, “very good”, things like that.
And what’s more: once I mentioned two authors that I
had barely read, and he didn’t stop to make a quiz about the authors, to test
me. No, he pushed the conversation further. If we always put others down, if we
are always using every chance to test others, we are worst collaborators than
A.I.
But, despite this not being really a technical aticle,
do I have a theoretical take on why I think we are different than A.I.? In fact,
I do.
I’m not a nothing “ologist”, but it seems that
artificial intelligence uses something called neural networks, which is based
in scientifical findings about how the brain supposedly works.
There is this famous phrase, “neurons that fire
together, wire together”. That is, the brain goes making connections between
things. How often these two things appear at the same time? And, when looking
for the “right” answer, it searches for something that is coherent with the
patterns of connections that are established in it’s “database”. At least from
a computational view of the brain.
So that’s how the artificial intelligence “imitates”
the brain. It reads tons of data, from all kinds of human communications, and
analyzed how often things appear connected, and gave more weight to those
connections in it’s huge database.
When the computer thinks about a theme, he looks
around and see what he previously, in his observations, brought closer to that
theme. He starts with a question and look for things that are strongly
connected to the concepts brought up by the question.
Well, I don’t know much about the brain itself, but
yes, I do believe the way our mind works have everything to do with
connections. Yes, some connections are given more “weight”, or we could say,
they are brought together closer than other connections. Then when we are
somewhere in our minds, we look around and look for things that are closer to
that situation, to find the answer to whatever question we are asking.
But here’s my point: our mind, I believe, don’t make
connections, don’t bring things together, as a merely observer computer. The
human mind’s goal, I think, is not to merely imitate whatever is outside. Our
mind has very individual goals. We are weird and we dream. We don’t just want
to see what’s there, like A.I. We want things that are not there yet.
We don’t validate, give “weight”, to connections, we
don’t bring ideas, words, together, just based on how often they appear
together outside. When someone makes a joke or writes a poem or song, we
validate it for how it makes us feel too. Maybe the guy connected two things
that no one else has ever connected, and Artificial Intelligence wouldn’t think
that connection is such a big deal, but hey, it made me feel closer to a
childhood dream, so, it’s a connection as “heavy” as “waters and pipes”.
So that’s why sometimes someone comes with an idea
that makes us think “hey, dude, that’s cool, where on earth did you get this
idea from?” Well, he looked around in his weird individual “database”,
different from everybody else’s. His own inner Universe shaped by his dreams of
things he may never actually have seen. His feelings, during his life, were
pushing things together behind the scenes, making a very unique set of
connections.
A.I., as cool as it is, don’t really “want” anything
other than just observe. That’s why we can come up with very “crazy” things
A.I. can’t. Specially if we are sincere with ourselves about our purposes, our
feelings.
And if we say “I believe in you”.
