One non-academic but very sensible way of understanding artificial intelligence.
For a long time now I’ve been asking myself the question: is digital good or bad for humanity? This simple at first sight question does not have a definite answer; it has only a potential for becoming more and more controversial with every advance in technology that the world encounters. AI is one of those controversial advances. Due to its complicated nature, the concept requires a whole new level of comprehension and many people cannot fully put their heads around it. I must admit that I am one of these people.
I made an attempt to understand it, though, and I want to share my thoughts with you. After 2 days of reading various articles about AI and its impacts, all of which made me very sleepy, I realised that I can’t understand something so interesting, yet extremely problematic, by just reading complicated words about it. I needed to feel something. I needed to get a bit closer to the whole idea and to try to experience it in some way.
After clarifying this with myself, I watched a film.
I am sorry if I fooled you to think that I did something extraordinary, this is not the case. However, it did the job better than all these articles I read. I am prepared for criticisms, Phil (my lecturer, guys 🙂 ). I know that this might not sound serious. But I am fine with it, because what makes humans different from machines is our ability to feel and experience, right?! To make it even weirder, after watching this film, I’m not sure what’s the answer of this question anymore.
Her (2013) follows the story of Theodore Twombly, an isolated, detached from the real world, broken-hearted man who reverts to artificially intelligent operating system called Samantha, to fulfill his needs of love, affection and understanding. Samantha becomes a fundamental part of his life because she is the only ‘person’ whom he feels truly comfortable with. Although, the ideas presented in this film may seem quite fantastical for today’s AI standards, they are more viable than you might think. By watching this film, I managed to experience AI alongside Theodore, which gave me a whole new level of understanding about the concept, but also left me with a lot of mixed feelings about it.
At first, Samantha becomes the perfect personal assistant for Theodore. Her super intelligence keeps him organised, helps him with his day to day tasks and makes him feel relaxed as everything seems in control. Very quickly their relationship becomes much deeper than the ordinary user-computer relationship for convenience.
As an AI, Samantha’s deep learning algorithms allow her to teach herself with time. Actually, the way Pete Trainor explained it to me was that when challenged with an unfamiliar concept, an AI would research everything about it overnight and would teach itself in order to be able to utilise this concept or idea in the future. However, the main source of this challenge for the system comes from the people that are using it. This is exactly what we observe in the film. Samantha’s interaction with Theodore, makes her curious about everything human and soon she turns into something more than just an all-knowing computer software. Through knowledge and replication, she starts developing affection, needs, wants and aspirations, resembling a real human being. The simulated brain neurons that constitute the OS, turn Samantha into an extremely intelligent human without a body. And if you wonder what neurons have to do with AI, Andrew Beattie explains it clearly in his article for techopedia.com:
“In order to get around the problem of task-orientated AIs, computer scientists started playing around with artificial neural networks. Our generally intelligent brains are made up of biological neural networks that make connections based on our perceptions and outside stimulus. Artificial neural networks try to recreate this learning system on computers by constructing a simple framework program to respond to a problem and receive feedback on how it does.”
And if you’ve suddenly started drawing pictures in your minds of machines taking over the world, Beattie adds:
“We are still a long way from neural networking our way to artificial intelligence. The problems being tested on neural networks are all expressed mathematically. You can’t hold a flower up to a computer and tell it to guess the color by the smell, because the smell would have to be expressed in numbers and then the computer would have to catalog those numbers in memory, along with images of flowers emitting that smell.”
Clearly, the relationship between Theodore and Samantha is mutually influencing; but whilst Samantha is becoming a better version of herself, does this apply to Theodore as well?
Share your views with me by commenting below. My account of the situation and some general thoughts about AI you’ll find in my next blog post.