A.I. that Understands
How you detect human-like intelligence
When you’re in trouble, one of the most comforting feelings is being in the presence of another person. This feeling goes so deep that you may not even be aware you experience it. In times of need you intuitively reach out to others to help you. And if there’s a foundation of good-will between you two, you can explain your situation, get the other person’s input, and with his or her help solve your problem.
Even between two people who don’t speak the same language, when they are in a difficult plight, they can achieve a basic understanding through gestures, facial expressions, sounds, or drawings. Computers, on the other hand, despite their wealth of data, generally can’t understand what you need in the same way as even a child can. When you’re truly lost, you reach out to a fellow human.
What is a computer missing? Why can’t it understand you? Surely Wikipedia has greater collected information than any single person could hope to amass in a 20 lifetimes. Nor is there a lack of entrepreneurs eager to create software to help you solve your problems. But even the best-trained chatbot feels like frustrating junk when your questions stray outside its narrow expectations. What’s missing is understanding.
The most convincing sign of human intelligence is that it understands what you mean. The signs are subtle, but rarely mistaken. When you probe a newly discovered chatbot with your impromptu Turing test, the key ingredient, the core competence you’re looking for is understanding. This is the heart of what it means to be human.
So let’s figure out what understanding is.
Words
Let’s start with something basic: how do you know if someone understands what a word means?
Sometimes you hear someone use a word or phrase incorrectly. This is a clue that the person doesn’t understand the word, or misunderstands it. On the other hand, using a word correctly in a few different sentences is the surest sign that the person understands it well. The more contexts you can use a word in, the better you understand it.
Look at the highlighted words in the following sentences:
- Separate the wheat from the chaff
- I can’t abide this
- Aiding and abetting
- Harbinger of doom
- Usurped the throne
- Slander and calumny
Like most English speakers, even though you understand each phrase as a whole, you have only a vague idea of what the highlighted word means. My guess is you would only feel comfortable using that word in that phrase. If, on the other hand, you do know what it means, you could use it in other sentences too.
A word is a tool, and like any tool, understanding it means using it effectively. There are better and worse ways to use a hammer, a chair, a book or a word. The better way is when it achieves your goals and solves your problems. Every word you use, or even think about, you do in the context of the goal you’re trying to achieve. This goal is the reason for using it.
Of course, your goals may be different from the goals of others. Words can be used to persuade someone to act now. Words can also be used to deceive, or to get people to support your cause. They can be used to entertain and bring joy. Speech has as many uses as there are human social motivations.
In all cases, your understanding of a word is measured by how well it achieves your goal. The greater the number of different scenarios in which you can use it successfully, the greater your understanding is.
Your skill with words changes as you grow. As a child you used words like “food” or “want” in the same way you would press a button on a machine: to push others directly towards what you want them to do. As you gained experience, you learned to predict how people think. You imagined what others were thinking when you spoke, and based your words on the effect you wanted to have on their thoughts. Your effect on others is now an imagined effect, but it is still real. This is similar to when a nuclear physicist manipulates atoms that she can’t actually see.
Understanding is Part of Planning
Earlier, I said that understanding something means using it correctly. But this is only part of the truth.
Before you speak a new sentence, you think of it in your mind. You then guess how people will react to it. As a result you either stick with your plan or search for something else to say. Before you act then, your ‘understanding’ plans your actions in your mind.
You usually don’t see when other people make plans. When you hear someone speak, you assume his understanding of the words showed in his speech and his skill. What you can’t see is how he used his understanding to make a plan beforehand. If he’s speaking to a crowd, for instance, he guessed how the audience would react to a certain phrase, and he planned his speech to take advantage of that. He predicted the effect, and saw that it would achieve his goals.
When driving, you predict how other cars will behave. You understand and can use traffic to your advantage. In short, understanding something is knowing how something or someone will react and change with different circumstances, then using that expectation to reach your goals
Understanding Shows Through Creativity
There are two parts, then, to understanding. The first part is predicting how things will behave, i.e. how they will change over time in different circumstances. The second part is using those predictions to solve your current problem.
Both parts are usually missing or limited in computers. For a computer to be considered creative, the solutions it comes up with must be dynamic, ad-hoc, and on-the-spot, given new situations and problems. If they seem pre-rehearsed or programmed, you tend to call them “scripted” or “robotic”.
Even a mundane conversation is a small creative act. Though you’re not always aware of it, the smallest daily interactions require you to produce creative solutions to impromptu problems. “How can I communicate my idea to this person?” “Should I apologize?” “How can I make her feel better about her loss?”
When faced with pressing or unexpected problems in life, you turn to others for help because they can creatively solve new or unseen problems. Therefore when you need help, you feel a stronger bond towards your fellow man or woman than to any tool or object, no matter how powerful the latter.
For A.I. to understand the meaning of things in a general sense, in other words to appear truly intelligent, it must do the same. Practically speaking, it must first predict how things around it will behave, including how people will react. As you saw above, using language well requires that you can predict how people will react to your words. Without understanding how other people behave and think, complex language would be impossible for A.I.
Once this is done, it must apply it’s understanding of the world to solving problems. It does this by creating plans, foreseeing if those plans solve the problem, and acting on the ones that do.
Many of the other articles in this blog discuss the actual systems for both prediction and problem solving. The purpose of this article is to connect the idea of understanding to both of those, and explain how and why you can instinctively identify something as ‘intelligent’.
Are you also working on applying human creativity, human understanding, even human values to Artificial Intelligence? I’m looking to connect with others who have a similarly ambitious vision of the future of A.I., who want to tap the full creative potential of human intelligence, in software.
