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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does Google Translate understand love?
Rick Rosner: Or, to put it more succinctly, does Google Translate know what love means? I guess that was more succinct. We know that lexicographically, Google Translate has a very good idea of how love and its foreign equivalence fit into various languages. So, for Google Translate, love is part of a huge, intricate big-data lexical network, but that doesn’t equal knowing anything. As you brought up before we started taping, Google Translate has no skin in the game and has no judgments. Love doesn’t affect Google Translate one way or the other, and Google Translate doesn’t have any means of judging what is good or bad for Google Translate. It’s got no emotional loading. I think you said it’s just the prefrontal cortex.
Jacobsen: So, it seems as if there is an associational net without valence or a prefrontal cortex without any bolstering structure.
Rosner: Okay. So that raises the question, given today’s technology, could you make a machine feel pleasure or pain? And I would argue that you probably could, that it’s all a matter of association. Well, for one thing, if something gives you pleasure, your behaviour will be to do things that increase the frequency or intensity of pleasure and the opposite for pain. You could probably build something like that into a machine; you could definitely build a machine that has the behavioural sophistication of a person, but has no ability to think but which will move towards things that are beneficial in a way from things that threaten it or hurt it. You could build a machine that has an associative net, associative via the associations it has with stuff and with its built-in behaviours which are doing that language, that last sentence is doing too much, but you could probably build in the sense of pleasure and pain that works the same way for a machine that it works for us without the bandwidth.
So I don’t know; I don’t think it’s impossible to build value judgments into Google Translate. An elementary sense of aesthetics and a bunch of other stuff, everything we know and feel is associational; it’s part of a network of associations that are triggered by memories and sensory input. Google Translate has an associative network, but it’s very one-dimensional to the point that it doesn’t really know anything. It can tell you 80 different words for love in a bunch of different languages and even sentences that are often associated with love, but it doesn’t know what any of that stuff means. Eventually, and maybe even now, people are going to build further associations into engines like Google Translate that will nudge it more towards what we think of as knowing, which almost the same thing as consciously appreciated is. We could spend a long time differentiating between the two, but really, we’ve just sketched out the rough landscape.
Quick addendum: we know the ingredients of our consciousness, which are all sorts of associative networks communicating with each other, visual networks, lexical networks, and spatial networks, which are closely related to visual networks, but the part of our brain that understands how three-dimensional space works. So all these associative networks being able to retrieve relevant information and the ability to experience pleasure and pain are closely associated with value judgments, the ability to judge how various things impact our knowledge about what’s good and bad. I think that’s basically most of the ingredients. Oh, and real-time processing of a flood of information, both external and internal.
Also, not only being able to retrieve memories but making new ones and the ability to change your mind. So maybe that’s all the elements of consciousness for us, maybe we missed a couple, but once we’ve got the elements of consciousness for us, then you have to talk about which of these elements are essential, like how much of a value judgment structure you need to be conscious. We’ve talked about the AI security guard who just watches warehouses, and so he’s aware of what’s going on on all the cameras and will trigger an alarm if the right elements are there but doesn’t necessarily feel good or bad about what happens in the warehouses and whether that AI security guard can be considered conscious.
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Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.Douglas.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
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Rick Rosner 