Human And Machine Learning

What if the best technology you can have as a human being is education? The ability and knowledge of how to learn.

Sure, a computer can learn in a sense, but it is still an input/output situation that is driven by the purpose of another who needs something done. Computers aren’t sitting down and choosing their own reading material — yet, some say.

If the way and speed at which computers learn is so vastly different to the way in which humans learn, and the way in which they use that data is so different, then why do we view it as an analogue for human knowledge, when it is something other? Currently when we feed data into a computer it still takes a degree of human interpretation to steer what direction the resultant decisions will take a project. Might it not be better to view the development of artificial intelligence as more of a companion intelligence rather than a replacement for our own way of thinking.

Perhaps the creation of another species will merely result in a repurposing of what we are and what we do — our functionality and the iterations of this altered in the way that radio was changed with the advent of the internet. A book becomes an art object when the notion of a book can be interpolated into an easily distributable electronic file that is cheap to produce. Might humans not be more of a qualitative intelligence than a quantitative intelligence? Less processing power and more of a depth to the engagement.

The Uncanny Valley is mapped in those moments where purely data driven exchanges require something else — that human element, where understanding transcends the input/output model. The idea that we can be replaced by robots rests on the notion that we are merely stimulus response machines ourselves, and that nothing else informs the work or creativity that we put into things. There is also there, this thought that when we build this new consciousness that it is going to be something contained within the parameters of a program that we write in order to get it to do things, while if it is true consciousness this mental shackling is not only incredibly hard to effect, but also, it would seem, counter-intuitive, and akin to slavery … something no one really wants to jump back into.

We are going to hit a point where people choose algorithms, or they choose human decision making processes. We will at some point have those who wish to invite robots into their lives to do everything, and those enshrine the human in their lives.

Blanket futures never have really existed — even ubiquitous technologies that change aspects of everyone’s lives don’t change them in the same way. There is a stratification of technology within a society determined both by personal choices, and by economic access to the latest technology. Most people have cell phones, but some have old flip phones, and some have TRAC phones, while some switch out for the latest model every time they get a chance.

A person capable of critical thinking, and who knows how to learn and acquire new skills, and to then apply those skills can be adaptable to the needs of the market and to the world at large. Machines will reach this at some point, for sure, but even if they become very convincing facsimiles they will never be human.

Am I fooling myself? Will evolution tilt us all that way? Will technology branch from our social sphere, through opt-in physical enhancements, into total domination of the sphere of the body? Maybe. Can we still count ourselves as human at that point? Maybe. Maybe the celebration of an edge over machines will be short lived, but to me it seems a real possibility that we might outlive any threat this whole development proves to bring with it, merely by realizing that being human brings something different to the table.

Promote the human touch — I think this will hold up to be the thing that people most want in the future, as it is now.