The article, "
Is it time to welcome our new computer overlords" is from the Atlantic. I got the link from a post on science writer Carl Zimmer's blog:
The Loom. Carl is the brother of Ben Zimmer, author of the Atlantic piece. Carl credits his brother with popping "the hype balloon that has inflated around the Watson computer’s performance on “Jeopardy.”
Some paragraphs from Ben Zimmer's article:
Oh, that Ken Jennings, always quick with a quip. At the end of the three-day Jeopardy! tournament pitting him and fellow human Brad Rutter against the IBM supercomputer Watson, he had a good one. When it came time for Final Jeopardy, he and Rutter already knew that Watson had trounced the two of them, the best competitors that Jeopardy! had ever had. So, on his written response to a clue about Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Jennings wrote, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
Now, think about that sentence. What does it mean to you? If you are a fan of
The Simpsons, you'll be able to identify it as a riff on a line from the 1994 episode, "
Deep Space Homer," wherein clueless news anchor Kent Brockman is briefly under the mistaken impression that a "master race of giant space ants" is about to take over Earth. "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," Brockman says, sucking up to the new bosses. "I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
Even if you're not intimately familiar with that episode (and you really should be), you might have come across the "
Overlord Meme," which uses Brockman's line as a template to make a sarcastic statement of submission: "I, for one, welcome our (new) ___ overlord(s)." Over on
Language Log, where I'm a contributor, we'd call this kind of phrasal template a "
snowclone," and that one's been on our radar since
2004. So it's a repurposed pop-culture reference wrapped in several layers of irony
But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on
Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with
The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the
Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a
Simpsons clue earlier in the
game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.
All this means, according to Zimmer, that "Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon." A computer may be able to do a table look-up on a reference; but, it still doesn't grasp the nuances of human use of snowclones, metaphors, irony, etc.
Zimmer does make some interesting comments to the effect on the fact that "We're all suckers for the man-machine trope, going back to John Henry's mythical race against the steam-powered hammer."
This all has implications for the "Soft AI" vs "Hard AI" debate. AI of course, refers to
Artificial Intelligence. The term was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956; McCarthy defined artificial intelligence as: "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." Some wit redefined AI as: "The art of making computers do what computers do in the movies."
The term
Soft AI refers to AI systems as they do today: Machines that solve problems using a
heuristic approaches programmed into them. Most people who work with computers today don't expect to go beyond this, probably because they've had to work with and around the limitations of their machines. A mentor of mine in programming constantly referred to the computer as "Dummy the dunce!"
Hard AI is the prediction that computers will someday duplicate human reasoning and intelligence, and go on from there to develop 'super-intelligence.' There are interesting philosophical groups forming around the idea of hard AI and super-intelligence; among them
the Transhumanists and
The Singulatarians.
I've encountered transhumanists and singulatarians at various futurist conferences. I had an interesting debate with a young man who couldn't understand why I didn't find the idea of uploading my mind into a computer inviting.
My real concerns with both groups is their simplistic optimism, not in their optimism per se, but in its simplicity. What I resist is the simplistic
technological utopianism inherent in both groups: the idea that the development of artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, and human enhancement will
in themselves bring about a utopia. I fear that, we could see a technological singularity with almost all of the benefits flowing to the ultra-rich, with most of the human race still living in squalor. We could see the upper 0.1% to 0.01% of the population becoming immortal, and most of the rest still denied basic medical care. I do not see that as moral or acceptable.
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