Ask A Genius 553 – Machine Learning as Early A.I.
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you wanted to talk about IBM’s Watson and Google Translate. What about them?
Rick Rosner: Both of them are machine learning – which is another term for A.I. – associational engines. Watson get a Jeopardy question entered into him/typed into him. Based on the words and the relationships of the words in the questions generates in a fraction of a second, a set of possible answers wih each one ranked in terms of probability of being correct.
If one of them hits above some threshold, maybe 80/90% of being correct, Watson will ring in with that answer. All this happened not too long ago. Since then, Watson has been sold to IBM’s clients as some kind of search engine or association engine.
My question, “How conscious, if at all, are machine learning, association engines like these?” I started reading an article that was from a journal titled something like ‘What is it like to be Watson?’ I started reading it.
The article turned out to be crap. The discussion focused on, “What is it to be human?” I am interested in what it is to be conscious. I looked up the name of the journal. It is the ‘American Journal of Behaviourism’ or something. It shocked me.
Behaviourism is some movement in psychology from the 1930s that it was too hard to figure out what is actually going on in the brain, so that movement decided to just look at thought and animals and humans in terms of behaviours. “We’ll leave the brain as a black box.”
It was the scientific equivalent of throwing up your hands and saying, “Fuck it!” It is surprising as we have increasingly advanced tools to look inside the brain on a fraction of a second basis. So, that was a garbage article.
But you can ask in a more legitimate way, ‘What makes consciousness conscious?’
Jacobsen: Also, what makes the non-conscious crucial to the conscious?
Rosner: Yes. Consciousness is built out of non-conscious building blocks. It’s got a physical basis. That is the processes that go on in the brain and some people like to argue that consciousness resides within certain structures within neurons. I find that to be a garbage theory.
Anyway. You look at human consciousness. Human consciousness is judge-y. That is, the events that happen o human consciousness and sensory input is judged according to a bunch of criteria, but, maybe, most importantly whether what is going on is good or bad for the human and whether the human being likes it.
So, there’s judging, pleasure, and pain. I find those hard to incorporate into consciousness. But I think the key for everything in consciousness is to see how it works associatively because you’re not conscious of anything.
Unless, it enters into an associative arena, where it can trigger a sensory event.
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