Tuesday, June 22, 2021

AI and the Pinocchio effect

 


The watchmaker rises early, and one morning is struck by the beauty of the dawn chorus.

After listening to birdsong, he creates a musical box; the kind where you turn the handle and small metal prongs are actuated by raised bumps on a rotating cylinder. Though not very much like birdsong, people like it and it sells well.

One of the musical boxes is bought by a furniture-maker. He crafts a small wooden body for the box, in the shape of a bird. Now, not only does it sound a bit like a bird, it looks like one too.

The two friends become transfixed by the task of creating ever more realistic toys. Their next attempt not only looks and sounds like a bird, but thanks to a Swiss watch mechanism, flaps its wings and turns its head, opening and closing its beak.

They are joined by an electrician. The musical box is replaced by a tiny sound-generating circuit. Intrigued by the possibilities, they eventually create a remote-controlled bird, one that flaps it’s wings, and can be steered into the air remotely. It looks and sounds so similar to a bird, that people occasionally mistake it for the real thing.

But the trio aren’t content. The watchmaker encourages his friends to create a device that can function autonomously: not merely a remote-control toy. They produce a masterpiece: a device that charges in the sun, that flies to the treetops at dawn, beautifully reproducing birdsong – flits from tree to tree, chases off birds that invade its territory, and even pecks at the ground periodically.

Now, when the watchmaker listens to the dawn chorus, he struggles to tell the real and the toy birds apart.

 

Has the watchmaker created a bird?

Probably you will be quick to say ‘no’. Not everything that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is a duck. You cannot create a bird by ever-more elaborate mechanical approximations, any more than you can create a boy by ever-more beautifully carved wood. You can only fool people better.

The remarkable thing is how eager we are to reach a very different conclusion when it comes to humans: as successive AI algorithms (such as GPT-3) approximate the noises and marks made by real people, we are inclined to think we might be approaching general intelligence or even – dare we say it – consciousness.

Our reasons for doing this – well, we have no reasons at all. We like toys. We instinctively attribute intentionality to objects in the world around us, and since the beginning of human history have loved to create dolls onto which we can project our hopes and fears. This is a profoundly, characteristically human thing to do – a deeper desire that echoes through our stories, movies and culture. We dream of Pinocchio perpetually.

The problem with our toys is (and I hope you can see from the bird example) that as we more closely replicate functionality - as the toys look more similar superficially - they are becoming less similar in a deeper sense. In the sense of what they are. Modern AI closely approximates human utterances through statistical approximation – by taking truly vast amounts of human examples and saying ‘in this situation a human would most likely say this’. This is absolutely not how we work: we say what we feel. We tend to say similar feeling things not because we have learned to approximate statistically, but because we are similarly designed. Sour tastes cause us to screw up our faces, reflecting a common reaction - not something we have approximated by observing others.

So AI ‘functional equivalence’ actually takes us further from actual equivalence. This is where the Turing test misleads us.

But what is the problem with having a sky filled with mechanical birds, if no-one knows the difference? If people still rise and thrill to the sound of the dawn chorus?

The problem is – as Deleuze & Guattari might put it – that birds are desiring-machines. They are connected to other desiring-machines in complex ways: ways in which our toy does not. We have only reproduced a bird from a narrow human perspective. In every other regard we have not.

We are also desiring-machines. AI undoes humanity.

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