Jan Swafford (asked to review the “artificial-intelligence-created” realization of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony”):
I’m midway in the philosophizing here, but my point so far is obvious enough: The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most. Deep Blue isn’t playing chess anymore and Watson isn’t on “Jeopardy!” because nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. We humans need to see the human doing it: Willie Mays making the catch that doesn’t look possible. When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do.
That’s half the answer to why I wasn’t expecting much in the way of revelation from DeepLudwig. The other has to do with a conviction about computers in general and artificial intelligence in particular, when it comes to their attempts to play ball on our turf in one way or another. Here’s my assertion: True intelligence is in a body. Intelligence outside a living body, as some sort of abstraction, is innately impossible, or should be given another name.
Unlike game worlds, the real world lacks fixed rules and a single, pre-defined objective: “Manhattan isn’t Atari or Go — and it’s not a scaled-up version of it, either,” writes Larson. The real world is ever-changing, open-ended, unpredictable, and inexhaustible in its meaningful details. It is rich in linguistic and cultural meanings, including social roles and settings, gestures, speech acts, texts, stories, traditions, and so forth. How many potentially important details does a buzzing street corner have? Infinitely many. […]
When we interpret the world around us, we do so with the help of an expansive range of concepts, rich in emotions and values: love, trust, betrayal, longing, hope, grief, remorse, shame, passion, abandonment, commitment, deception, guilt, generosity, brutality, humor, bravery, selfishness, wisdom, and countless others. […]
Together, these human-centric concepts form a framework through which we “take in” and interpret the human world. We acquire this set of ideas and interpretive skills through enculturation, the learning of language, life experience, and the reflection on our experience, all of which are rooted in our physical, emotional, and biological nature. These concepts are indispensable for any non-superficial grasp of human life — which means they are also fundamental for human intelligence. There can be no “human-level” general AI, one worthy of the name, that does not adequately imitate this level of human thought.
Does this set the bar too high for general AI? No, it brings into view what human intelligence is, what that holy grail of AI research would be. As John Haugeland wrote in a classic and still pressing 1979 paper:
“There is no reason whatsoever to believe that there is a difference in kind between understanding “everyday English” and appreciating literature. Apart from a few highly restricted domains, like playing chess, analyzing mass spectra, or making airline reservations, the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings.”
Hasselberger in his review of Larson does not directly invoke the principle of charity, but I think that principle or habit undergirds much of what he says about conversation: “When we interpret the world around us, we do so with the help of an expansive range of concepts, rich in emotions and values: love, trust, betrayal, longing, hope, grief, remorse, shame, passion, abandonment, commitment, deception, guilt, generosity, brutality, humor, bravery, selfishness, wisdom, and countless others.” All of those emotions and values are closely related to our need to converse with others and the assumption of sense-making that follows from that need. Turing Tests at their worst are a cheap exploitation of some of the habits most deeply characteristic of our humanity.
As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.