Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
Waves of automation have driven human advance, and each wave requires humans to The promise of AI is to launch new systems of automated intellectual endeavour that will be the first systems to adapt to us. In this talk I’ll introduce the notion of the atomic human and show how artificial intelligence may be a way to better understand human intelligence.
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Patrick Boyde’s talks on the Sistine Chapel focussed on both the structure of the chapel ceiling, describing the impression of height it was intended to give, as well as the significance and positioning of each of the panels and the meaning of the individual figures.
The Creation of Man
One of the most famous panels is central in the ceiling, it’s the creation of man. Here, God in the guise of a pink-robed bearded man reaches out to a languid Adam.
The representation of God in this form seems typical of the time, because elsewhere in the Vatican Museums there are similar representations.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo,_Creation_of_Adam_04.jpg
The Blue Marble
The Atomic Human
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the autobiography of Jean Dominique Bauby. Jean Dominique, the editor of French Elle magazine, suffered a major stroke at the age of 43 in 1995. The stroke paralyzed him and rendered him speechless. He was only able to blink his left eyelid, he became a sufferer of locked in syndrome.
Bandwidth Constrained Conversations
Embodiment factors imply that, in our communication between humans, what is not said is, perhaps, more important than what is said. To communicate with each other we need to have a model of who each of us are.
To aid this, in society, we are required to perform roles. Whether as a parent, a teacher, an employee or a boss. Each of these roles requires that we conform to certain standards of behaviour to facilitate communication between ourselves.
Control of self is vitally important to these communications.
The high availability of data available to humans undermines human-to-human communication channels by providing new routes to undermining our control of self.
The consequences between this mismatch of power and delivery are to be seen all around us. Because, just as driving an F1 car with bicycle wheels would be a fine art, so is the process of communication between humans.
If I have a thought and I wish to communicate it, I first need to have a model of what you think. I should think before I speak. When I speak, you may react. You have a model of who I am and what I was trying to say, and why I chose to say what I said. Now we begin this dance, where we are each trying to better understand each other and what we are saying. When it works, it is beautiful, but when mis-deployed, just like a badly driven F1 car, there is a horrible crash, an argument.
A Six Word Novel
But this is a very different kind of intelligence than ours. A computer cannot understand the depth of the Ernest Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word novel: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never worn”, because it isn’t equipped with that ability to model the complexity of humanity that underlies that statement.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Lunette Rehoboam Abijah
Blake’s Newton
Elohim Creating Adam
Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden
Thanks!
For more information on these subjects and more you might want to check the following resources.
- book: The Atomic Human
- twitter: @lawrennd
- podcast: The Talking Machines
- newspaper: Guardian Profile Page
- blog: http://inverseprobability.com