The Problem with AI

‘Alexa, shuffle country right now’

Humans and AI process information in fundamentally different ways. People don’t understand this, and so articles and discussions about AI invariably muddle up the dangers and potential of AI, and the ways in which humans will be able to work with computers.

Humans, as I have explained elsewhere, encode experiences in terms of how those experiences make them feel. They store those feelings and can use them to conjure up all kinds of things – a recollection, or a sentence for example.

One of the things I am especially bad at is remembering song lyrics. I get the meaning right, but the actual word wrong. I sing a word that means the same thing (emotionally) but isn’t the word used in the song. There’s a whole post around why some people are better at this than others, but I am not going to go into that here, right now.

Here, right now, I want Alexa to play the Country & Western playlist that I like. It’s got lots of the modern numbers in it. I play it often. In other words, it’s got a specific sentiment. A sentiment I can use to say:

‘Can you play that country playlist I like?’ or

‘Play the usual one – you know, the popular country music’ or

‘Can you play the modern country playlist?’

Like everything else we express, there are a huge number or ways of saying the same thing – and this works because however we say it, people get what we are talking about, because it makes them feel roughly the same.

But not with AI. AI does not feel anything. That is not how it encodes information. That is not how it processes what we say. For no particular reason at all, the playlist I like is called ‘Country Right Now’. So to get it to play, I have to say PRECISELY the words ‘Alexa, shuffle Country Right Now’ – which of course would be a very odd thing to say to a person.

What I would like to impress on you is that we do not get around this problem with ‘natural language processing’. It doesn’t matter how many variations of phrases you add. At the most fundamental level AI does not feel our intent when we speak, and this problem cannot be solved by piling on more complexity – we are just creating a very complicated steam engine, that looks like a human.