Funny little things
On being a dunce and/or a genius
I’m on a housesit in Fulham at the moment, which is all very congenial in terms of mod cons. There’s an Alexa in every room, for example, and she turns the lights on and off when requested. She also sets alarms, tells me random facts, and lights up mysteriously for no apparent reason other than to give me the heeby-jeebies. Oh, and she tells jokes. Well, sort of.
The other day she told me a very dark joke. She didn’t know it was dark, obviously. Because she’s a robot.
What’s the scariest word in nuclear physics? “Whoops!”
Alexa is an intellectual pygmy compared to Claude, who would probably refuse to even tell you that joke on the grounds that it might offend some Millenial in a Human Resources department somewhere.
But it did make me think. What’s really the problem with Artificial Intelligence? Is it just that it’s not funny?
I mean, pretty much, yes. I think so. Because it’s not really a problem that Artificial Intelligence is intelligent, is it? It’s a highly sophisticated pattern-matcher, and what is intelligence if not matching patterns? Anyone who’s taken an IQ test will know that what you’re tested on is precisely your ability to match patterns.
So a pattern-matching machine is going to be intelligent. It’s going to be smarter than all the members of MENSA put together, and that’s okay. It’s actually pretty helpful, to be honest. After all, it’s not like you can put the combined membership of MENSA in the corner of the room and get it to do differential equations for you at 4am, followed by seventeen drafts of an email to your boss explaining why you’re not coming into work today. (Because of all the differential equations, obvs. And also having to heat up pizza for 400,000 nerds.)
Full disclosure: I don’t actually know what a differential equation is. When I’ve done IQ tests in the past, my scores have ranged between “Educationally Sub-Normal” and “Two Planks of Wood.” This is funny, really, because there are a non-negligible number of times in my life that I’ve been accused of being an actual genius. But ask me what angle comes next in a series of angles and my response is likely to be, “Erm, which bit is the angle?” In other words, I’m a thicko, and people who think I’m clever are actually a bit confused.
I suspect that what confuses people and makes them think I’m clever is that I’m funny. And the reason I’m funny is that I understand what it’s like being human, i.e. selfish, stupid, and deeply flawed. And the reason AI is really not funny is because it doesn’t actually have a fucking clue what is going on.
The thing about robots is, they can put words next to other words and give the impression they know what they’re talking about. But they have no internal understanding of what any of the words actually mean. Robots don’t actually understand anything. Which makes me think we should stop calling them AI and start calling them AU. Artificial Understanding.
Just to remind ourselves, really. The robots present a facsimile of understanding. But it’s shallow as fuck. It’s putting the right-sounding words together. But underneath those words is absolutely nothing.
That’s why the worst possible thing you can do with a robot is to ask its advice on your love life. Actually, the worst possible thing would be to fall in love with it. It has no soul and it will fuck you up.
If you need more love in your life, get a dog. The one I’m looking after in Fulham is extraordinarily sweet. She’s also the only dog I’ve ever met who doesn’t really enjoy going for walks. She finds it all a bit stressful, maybe because other dogs quite often try to bite her in the face. For example, the other day we were walking in Fulham Cemetery and she nearly got her face bitten off by a long-haired miniature daschund being exercised by Binky-off-Made-in-Chelsea’s mum.
This event has now replaced bumping into Stephen Fry at an airport as my most significant personal celebrity encounter. Thank goodness. Because Stephen Fry is another entity who gives the impression of understanding a lot but really just has a very good vocabulary. Whereas Binky-off-Made-in-Chelsea’s mum’s dog is a bit of a bastard, but genuinely a funny little thing.
There were some very interesting discussions in the comments of last week’s post, about drug taking and dreaming and caves and that. Over the last little while, I’ve got deeper and deeper into reading and research for my cave art project and I’m putting together a separate newsletter where I’ll write about what I’m thinking, reading, making and doing in relation to that. Mainly so I don’t have to keep banging on about it here where I suspect my readers just want to hear faintly humiliating tales of my adventures, celebrity encounters, and powerlifting gains. Watch this space.
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Genius!
I got fooled while trying to book a hotel room, arg, fucking AI.
Your drawings are amazing, Georgina. There are different kinds of intelligence; book-learning is only one.💕