Foonicate

Things To Do When The Fog Breaks Your Fall

December 13, 2007 – 3:58 pm

With school wrapping up for the term, I find myself a bit more interested in writing. Not to mention the fact that Cytizen has decided to write once more on his blog, which gives me something to read and imitate blasphemously. There has always been a strange issue with my interest in writing; it only comes when I feel like someone may actually be paying attention to it. Do I have a need for approval and acceptance and attention? With text, most definitely. Of course, this does not apply to people who comment here in all CAPS or defend those who comment in all CAPS or small, amphibious creatures that have an affinity toward Arial font (not that I’ve ever met one of those). No, I just feel like jotting down some of my thoughts as I finish off my final exams. Today the focus has been World History from 1500 to the present. I have absolutely nothing interesting to say about this course except that history, as fascinating as it is, seems incredibly surreal to me. I can read about it, see images pertaining to it, look at art from the era, or watch a documentary about it, and I still find myself in awe at some of people, places, and events that occurred. I suppose being unable to experience these events leaves me with a bit of anxiety regarding the factuality of it all. Not that I doubt history as a whole, just that I sometimes lie awake at night wondering if we are just a simulation being controlled by another simulation being controlled by some alien life form. If this were the case, and we were a simulation, then history wouldn’t be real? Or would it? Just as real to us as life is, of course… even if life wasn’t real. And with how surreal my regular life seems to be at times (like when I realize that it’s been an entire day but it feels like I’m just waking up), it’s hard to believe that anything is real. Or perhaps I have some undiagnosed psychosis. But I digress…

Someone at work the other day asked me if I remembered Max Headroom. I find this incredibly amusing given that Cytizen himself wrote a post not too long ago on Max Headroom. And prior to Cytizen’s writing about this wonderful A.I. the world grew to love, no one had mentioned Max Headroom to me in years. My field of interest leans heavily into artificial intelligence, as I see the possibility of making computers humanistic something that could be completely achieved within the next hundred years. As of yet, I can’t wrap my mind around the full human-computer, for just the language barrier alone keeps the dream at bay. Take for instance the English language (I use this as an example because I’m not fluent in any other language at the moment) and the many connotations that can be applied with a few simple words. Slang alone can be extremely difficult for a foreign person to come to understand when learning English. But imagine not being able to hear the changes in tonality of the human voice when someone is speaking. You would have a very difficult time deciphering whether someone was angry, sad, hurt, confused, sarcastic, or anything else. Now take away being able to see the expression on the person’s face on top of the lacking tonality in their voice. Determining a person’s mood becomes something that must be felt, empathetically. Take away empathy and intuition and touch. Now you have a computer.

So, you can give a computer millions of photo and voice samples and a high-level program to determine the pattern differences in facial expressions and tonality. But what about those who don’t change either when they crack a joke? What about the constantly evolving realm of slang, where common phrases can mean many different things given a situation? I am not an expert on computational linguistics or visual recognition, nor do I know what advances have been made in this field nor the capacity of computer determination of human characteristics and qualities; but from what little I’ve read on the subject, and the few newer web-based A.I.’s that I’ve messed around with, I can only imagine that the world of artificial intelligence has a long way to go before robots can become truly humanistic. The thought of a human robot is scary for most, with movies like I, Robot (personally, I was not very impressed with this film) generated to scare the public, but regardless of the fears that may be attached to this type of technological advancement, humans will never stop their pursuit until they’ve achieved the end. Somewhere in this sphere of study, I hope to contribute my piece, however tiny and unimportant it may be. And then I can die happy. With peanuts.