The computers won’t look back

Why do we even want computers writing bodicerippers? Won’t it help the headless robot cheetah slip its leash?

The Google Brain AI project seriously did just try writing romance novels. And while they stank, so does most human-unit-generated stuff. Indeed, I’m surprised judges in a recent Dartmouth College “Turing Test” style competition could distinguish machine-made sonnets because, one judge said, they had “idiosyncrasies of syntax and diction, uses of language that were just a little off.” Human poets don’t?

McGonagall’s Tay Bridge Disaster certainly was one. Or, closer to home, James McIntyre’s Ode On The Mammoth Cheese (“We’rt thou suspended from balloon/You’d cast a shade, even at noon”). But at least there’s something charming in a person who doggedly churns out such doggerel. Where’s the appeal if computers do it, badly or, worse, well?

Is the world a better place because computers now beat us at chess, Go and manufacturing? We get cheap shoes when Adidas undercuts cheap Third World labour with German robots. But given the social devastation caused by the disappearance of unskilled work, we might be a bit less gleefully complacent about the whole project.

Psychologist and AI theorist Gary Marcus recently lamented that even speechrecognition AI is still “brute force in the sense that it needs a lot of data to work efficiently” whereas “if you want to advance in science or technology, we’d like for machines to be able to take all the literature that’s out there and synthesize it in a way that people can’t.” What if they could? Would we even be able to understand it when they explained it to us? If they did?

The people working on Siri, Cortana and interactive robots dream of machines talking to us, using real language, grasping the concepts behind it and acting accord- way? Especially if we naively succeed in giving them emotions like, say, resentment.

Oh, you say, we’d never do that. But it’s not up to us. As AI increasingly produces science we can’t even understand, it will increasingly drive research and production, not just of machinery but of the AI modules them-