[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: A quick thing that just came up.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, quick thing you just came out. So, sincere disagreement. Go.
Rosner: All right, so we were having a disagreement about whether it matters whether an AI appreciates its own jokes or not. Basically we’re arguing about a very short window I think in the development of AI between when AI can do things at a human level of expertise which is now in some areas and when AI becomes fully integrated in various information modes and becomes conscious. So that period between when AI is just an imitation, just kind of this machine learning generator of somewhat sophisticated product and you can argue about whether it means anything because the AI isn’t really thinking. I’m arguing that’s a fucking short time window between now and I don’t know, 2028. In 2028, in 2038, you’ll still be able to build AIs that aren’t conscious but if you don’t give a shit or you find it’s an easy improvement to incorporate, like in 2038 it will be no problem to make conscious AIs.
So the argument about whether your machine understands or not becomes moot by the end of the 2020s. There will be arguments about when machines become conscious. Sometime before the mid-20s, 30s you’re going to have conscious machines. Do you agree?
Jacobsen: I agree on that point. I think it just depends on your point of view. So my disagreement wasn’t that they’ll produce jokes. I think the computers will very rapidly on a logarithmic scale work at a superhuman level in the production of humor. So they’ll understand the math, the statistical generation of humor with any language. Once it’s done with one language you can translate it into another. However, the idea of humor is a meaning contextualized in a body, so it’s a mind embedded in a body with a physiological reaction to it and then we call that humor.
Rosner: I disagree. I mean I believe laughing is a physiological reaction but the structure of the thing that generates the laughter is I don’t think body dependent; I think its information dependent.
Jacobsen: So maybe humor is actually the small category here and the larger category is something like insight or sort of play on words.
Rosner: No, I think a joke is a particular type of presentation of information where a complicated setup is abruptly resolved by the punch line rather than by laborious gaining of experience, trial and error. If something happens abruptly you see cause and then immediately effect; guy slips on a banana peel… you just learn something not to do very quickly. Hammered home by the other guy’s misfortune and you laugh… boom. That’s something that I will look out for and it only took me three seconds of watching this guy go on his ass to get that little nugget of experience.
Jacobsen: I take it in this context the shorthand of the information, the reaction to that; it’s certainly the physiological reaction. It’s maybe it’s sort of decoupling it from any evolutionary history and you’re just looking at the structure of tinctured information. I mean there’s a Voltaire quote, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” That has a structure of a joke, may or may not produce a laugh but it’s not an insight about anything necessarily.
Rosner: It’s kind of like a Mark Twain and kind of pithy aphoristic kind of short little deal similar to the supposed Chinese saying “May you live in interesting times,” where the message is short but it contains more information than most short messages.
Jacobsen: Yes. So yeah, there it is. There’s a certain pithy constructions of language to a type of evolved organism produce awe if there’s some things or humor in other contexts but the general concept is more what you’re saying where you can decouple it entirely and it’s a tincturization.
Rosner: Well, its information presented compactly based on how we process information. Machines will come to know.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 