2015: An Earth Odyssey
Season 1: In which we experience a case of Divine…catastrophic interference.
by Steve Lescault
Meet Intellogo, the new horizon of content discovery platforms. Forgive the long title, I’ve spent months immersed in 19th century literature. At Intellogo we feed time-honored elements of great storytelling to our artificially intelligent utility, making innovative use of the public domain. We are machine learning explorers in the process of digitally fingerprinting English usage in all its essence. Our engineers built this fantastic machine that learns features of literature, and discovers content that shares desired literary insight.
Technically challenged, I read. I read and read and read… obsessively so, from Chaucer verse to Churchill quotes to Charmin packaging. On breaks, I write. It is fitting therefore, that I be Intellogo’s Content Architect responsible for the Insights authors and their readers might appreciate. Intellogo built the mothership of all search engines, and I was invited onboard to teach the written word to the ship’s computer. Note to the layman: Bring your tackle, there’s room for you in the universe of A.I. It surrounds us, and it applies to all our lives.
Since being thrust into the world of artificial intelligence, I’ve felt the need to share my quirky experiences as I witness the power of Intellogo. My first task was to teach the machine the Genre of Mystery, a feature of our Insights. I had read about 100 detective novels the year before, so I felt confident enough, even though this machine learning business was all Greek to me. I fed this new-fangled contraption a few favorites from the Golden Age of Detection, and it promptly ingested them. (That’s the technical term, ingested, hence the literal feeding.) I tweaked a bit, fed it some more intrigue, and in a few hours the machine was recommending a corpus that rivaled any online catalogue for public domain mysteries. I gasped many times during the process, and six months later, I still experience the daily goosebumps.
I’ll share a second adventure, and illustrate another technical term. On the third day, I moved on to the Science Fiction Insight. Though mysteries are what thrill me most, it occurred to me that I had written a book report on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, way back in grade school. Getting over those goosebumps, I fed The Machine to the machine, and then Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein went in, and of course, some Jules Verne. Wouldn’t you like to help me feed my new companion?
I was quite enjoying myself thinking this is really too easy (the engineers had done the hard part, and man had they ever built an efficient machine) when the computer suddenly went berserk. It didn’t go haywire, erratically, with blips and bleeps followed by a system crash. It retorted 99% excellent consistent results…but in an entirely different field of study. The Bible.
All you philosophers out there, I could have used your help. Neil, our founder, and Christa, our navigator, were on another deck so I said to the universe “Boss, what have you created,” and “S… I already broke the machine.” I tried coaxing my student back to the subject at hand, but it wanted nothing to do with the day’s class. Stubbornly, it only recognized the Word of God. Except for one oddly acceptable reading recommendation: the Fibonacci Sequence. At least it was scientific. My student was instantly born-again, with all the conviction of a religious devotee. And I couldn’t just say “let there be light”…double-right click. Our team philosophized on the nature of science fiction, and the style of the Bible. I was flooded with epiphany. I felt in a flash that I was the computer, and it was humankind.
I reasoned with Intellogo for hours until it reconciled itself with pure science fiction. Thank God for supervised learning. Months later, our Science Fiction expert Bernard Reischl would say to me, totally out of the blue, “You know the best science fiction book ever written is the Bible.” More rising of the flesh.
When it came time to teach Intellogo the concept of itself, machine learning, I myself learned on Wikipedia that there was a term for what Intellogo had experienced: “catastrophic interference, also known as catastrophic forgetting, is the tendency of an artificial neural network to completely and abruptly forget previously learned information upon learning new information.” It happens to all of us. The brilliance of A.I. is human too. You have a team of engineers and content architects to stay the mast.
It’s a small, coherent step from artificial memory to artificial intelligence. Historically. Technically.
What parallels do you draw between the Bible and science fiction? Share your thoughts! and welcome to Intellogo.
