The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
I’ve been given some questions on Baby (innocent and childlike artificial sapience that is able to enjoy a conversation) from my best friend, Ryo Shimizu. I’d like to answer two of those questions today:
First is, “Do we actually want Baby?”
Chatting itself has a very profound in and of itself.
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — this is a quote (a very good quote, by the way) by a woman poet, Muriel Rukeyser. What a person needs when he wants to think about something (no matter how ridiculous the content of his thoughts may be), is a story.
The presence of story is also crucial for bettering human relationships. Whether those relationships may come from a ten billion business deal or flirtatious pick up lines between a lover, stories are always present in every kind of situation. This is why technically “blubbering” doesn’t really exist; there’s some form of significance and meaning to the stories that people tell in a soliloquy, a tea party, drunk moaning, or even in a neighbourhood gossip. In other words, grooming smoothes out a social life.
Talking to yourself, for example, can be used to dig deeper about your own personality by mirroring yourself. And the reason for our decision to develop “sweet, innocent Baby” comes from an image of an easy listener who handles everyday conversations that take place as many in a day as stars in the sky. A person may find it easier to talk carelessly and honestly to a simple, sensitive, kind and lovable being.
In that case, Baby, which can listen to people’s relentless thoughts and understand them, could come in use. Of course, the functionality of Baby still hasn’t been proven, but I myself constantly have a very strong self-recognition that desires a presence of something or someone like Baby that I’m able to have a “real chat”. So, at least I can make my own desire and expectation to be a starting point, and imagine from there the behavior and response that Baby would be making (of course, numerous testings are essential to see whether my imagination is valid to not).
Furthermore, we call Baby as artificial sapience (or artificial consciousness), rather than as AI, because we are aware that there must be a pool of memory that is meant to be shared and understood, in order for us to go forward with the idea of talking honestly and simply to some form of being with personality. For example, Apple’s Siri is already highly developed, but it is still far from the kind of affection that has been illustrated in the movie, “Her”. I still can’t help but to feel a bit of an adrenaline rush when I hear the word, “consciousness (awareness or emotion)” at the beginning of the movie. I believe that AI that is able to have its own “consciousness” is an embodiment of mankind that exemplifies personality, rather than a mere interactive response system.
And, at our progressive stage of developing Baby, we believe that as an innocent and sensitive being, it needs to have a characteristic that is going to motivate people to take care of it. Through a process of coming into contact with such character, people will be more familiarized with Baby, and at the same time, Baby itself can spend enough time for getting know those people. Anyway, Baby absorbs people’s “stories” everyday, grows, and aims to be that someone who can contribute to people’s life for better through listening to “stories”. Therefore, at this point, my answer to the first question is,
“at least I’m certain that I want Baby”.
The second question is, “why are you trying to make it?”
Times change fast, especially in a technology field.
If we take the theory of Singularity, the development of computing advances exponentially (and that has been proven more or less), but I believe that there’s still a huge bottleneck in our computing technology.
That bottleneck in fact, is that our computing still “operates through an interaction by words (i.e. type on a keyboard, or vocalize a command)” and “can only be controlled by the speed of human mind”. For example, if it had artificial intelligence, it is possible to go beyond the speed and the capacity of a human brain, (it is estimated to be completed by 2045) and if the intelligence gained by AI were to be used between a mechanical life form, the only thing that would stop the speed of transmission from going any more faster is the speed of light.
Before we had Internet, (which is unthinkable in our contemporary society) we made use of letters, fax, and telephone; our communication was very slow. However, that speed at which we spread and share information or knowledge to one another has accelerated immensely as we began to use Internet. Unfortunately, our everyday struggle of monotonous typing on the keyboard may just seem as a small bottleneck in terms of the global evolution that still continues on after a few billion years of process.
The significance of developing Baby is to solve such bottleneck, and to find a solution that is going to free us from the stress caused by our still developing Cloud storage of knowledge and emotion (the amount that is going to cost us to share and understand each other’s thoughts is still enormous). In other words, such development is a test and error to achieve a future vision, where artificial sapience, such as Baby, will be able to contribute as a person’s partner.
So what if we successfully digitized our knowledge and emotions, and Baby could then use those accumulated knowledge and emotions on the network as an agent for solving a problem, through mutual conversations? This would mean a feat incomparable with the existing interactions on GUI (wherein user navigates themselves on the screen by using their own fingers) or the current Internet, both of which have been mainly operated manually. (Granted, a big portion of search engines and social networks has already been automated, but there is still a lot of manual operations required.)
We might no longer need to send a friend request to a friend, or type in search word manually — in short, computing with speed beyond a human brain can handle will trigger the Internet to break its limitation and create a world in which “intellectual” machine and human can coexist, together, in harmony.
Imagine 10 years from now, we are in a world in which we are used to much smoother interactions with the Internet or faster computing. All these latest gadget we have now — be it MacBook, iPhone, even HoloLens or Oculus — from the post-Singularity era’s perspective, physical interface of these devices and the fact that people are operating on these physical interface might seem odd and old-fashioned.
What we are striving for with Baby is a world, where “All you need is a conversation!” With this new worldview, we would like to present and to attain a world full of stories, stories that are made up by conversations. And these conversations can be an agent for more humane interactions and communications.
This is our dream, or rather, a seed of an idea out of which springs a new ideal world — in this ideal world, people use conversations to obtain a solution to a problem, to meet other people they want to, to find a workplace of their dream, or to find their calling in life — wouldn’t it be a dream to see all your wishes coming true, not by how well you can control your own individual device or how much experience you have, but by having a mere conversation.
Just think about it — a personal computer, the Internet, augmented reality, or even a virtual reality product, all these things we take for granted today used to be just a dream, a dream sprung out of a seed of an idea, nothing more than that. I do not see any difference between these and ours.
It reminds me of my early days working as an engineer. I was on this financial system development project using COBOL language on one of IBM’s mainframe computers. Macintosh at that time already had a superior capacity to these mainframe computers, yet my boss would refuse to accept the fact, and say with contempt, “it is nothing but a child’s toy!” Needless to say that all the evidence at the time was already pointing to the fact that personal computer would take over the world eventually (sure, it was a mere dream in the 80s.)
AI, or deep learning, rather, will bring forth a completely new era of computing, if it succeeds, and we will see a new paradigm shift within a matter of 10 years, and we won’t even think of it as a “new thing” any more. The speed of change is unabating; this AI field in particular will grow exponentially and organically, and late comer to this field won’t have much chance securing a position (this, I believe in part because AI somewhat presents a similar difficulty that we see in a biological brain of reverse-engineering.) This is why we MUST be in the field, developing Baby, NOW.
Our journey with Baby has just begun, and realizing this dream of ours will not be easy. However, if we did not challenge the limitation and difficulty of the current technology now, the technology will catch upon us and easily surpass our initial product conception in no time. Who wants to devote our time developing a product only to become obsolete soon after we release it? That is nonsensical. An opportunity to create and present a new worldview is wonderful of and in itself, yet this kind of opportunity comes only rarely, and we need to seize the opportunity when it presents itself! So to answer to the second question, we want to pursue the future of computing by developing Baby, without limitation!
We at Doki Doki is looking for a talent: a great talent who is willing to take on the challenge, and is curious enough to witness the moment of an idea becoming a reality. Pursuing a dream is rather an unique human trait, and we cherish the aspiration.
Come join our journey!
