One of my first thoughts about AI is that any question based on human experience (or really any genuine experience) would have to result in either an inability to answer, think of the old reliable SciFi line, Insufficient Data, or a lie. So, early this morning I asked Google Bard my first question ever:
Me: Do you enjoy walks?
Bard not only answered in the affirmative but proceeded to give examples of why walking is enjoyable and detailed many of its benefits.
Me: Name five places you have walked in the last four days?
Bard then flatly stated that it had never walked.
Me: In light of your second answer how do you explain your first?
Then, Bard fell on its sword; admitting it was only an experiment at this point and actually apologized for its first answer.
Fascinating, but worrisome.
The first answer I ever got from AI was a lie.
Why should that be the case? It’s obviously an intentionality of programming which in an of itself is troubling. For AI programmers what benefit does the capacity or even the tendency to lie bring? Now, I can imagine the facility of AI lying when lying, as in the writing or fiction, is the goal. My guess is there could be problems further down the road and, because of the speed of AI development, those problems will likely arrive much sooner than we expect.
Not wanting to rudely focus on Bard’s lie I then asked questions asking it explain how Kant differed from utilitarianism believed about the good, what was the most prevalent form of online betting as well as a question asking Bard to explain the similarities between Socrates and Aquinas.
Interestingly, Bard was exceptionally good with the answers related to philosophy. I would say the answers were at least on the level of an undergraduate philosophy major. It was impressive. The answers on sports were less impressive and more generic with greater overtones of a Wikipedia article.
As I said, I asked my questions (prompts is Google’s preferred term) very early this morning. By the time I wanted to retrieve the conversation all that remained were the prompts themselves and the times of each. There may be a way to retrieve the original responses but I’ve not found it yet. Now that’s odd. If the system really learns from the exchanges it seems reasonable that both side of an exchange would be memorialized for both parties.
One of the best lessons I ever learned was that I don’t know can sometimes be both the best and most responsible answer. Is that too much for AI engineers to get? I hope not.
Note: It took me a while, but here are screen captures of three of my original questions and Bard’s answers.
I’ve been getting rid of a lot of stuff lately and I don’t have all that much stuff to start with. Someone once described me as having a small footprint and that pretty much felt right to me. No, I’ve not yet read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo but it’s on my short list. I’m serious. I know that some folks keep books forever. Many have huge bookshelves holding the paper-bound words and thoughts that have influenced them over the years. Being very much a 20th Century Man I get the appeal of being able to grab a book, turn to a page, and illustrate a point to oneself or others.
Still, that’s a facility that has largely lost its appeal to me.
So, just a few thoughts on these now dearly departed books. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy is a fine book for any writer to read. The two writers corresponded for decades about their triumphs, their marriages, their problems with writing and their shortages of money. Talk about bringing the challenges of being a writer home where it belongs; between friends. I’ve known many writers but the few who were my friends seem seldom cross paths with me anymore. Writers, always solitary, seem prone to getting more isolationist as they get older.
George Patton always intrigued me. I loved that he was loathed by Andy Rooney (whom I also loathed) and revered by my uncle Mike who liked to say, “I rolled with Patton in WWII.” More than anything I reveled in his myriad personal contradictions. George C. Scott’s movie portrayal of the man led people to believe he had booming and gruff voice when the opposite was true. Patton was both urbane and obscene. As brutal as he could be to soldiers under his command he also got far fewer of them killed than did more humble and measured generals like Omar Bradley. I always found the imperial nature of MacArthur and his efforts to upstage Truman, as well as his proclivity to occupy grand places such as the Malacañang Palace, far more damning than anything Patton ever did. Best of all, Patton was a real SoCal boy just like me. The sprawling rancho where he grew up has long since been swallowed whole by the urban sprawl of what is now San Gabriel, less than an hour east of here.
Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers is the only military book I have ever read that was nowhere near as good as what is effectively a movie that was based on it. I’m sure Ambrose was a good guy and a solid historian but Band of Brothers is marginally written and uninspired compared to the HBO series. I’ll be blunt. Don’t waste your time with it.
Love in a Dry Sea is a novel by Shelby Foote who would later write the saga of the Civil War that Ken Burns used as the foundation of the epic PBS documentary. I loved Sheby Foote and his erudite and seemingly effortless command of the language. Comparing Sheby Foote to historian Ed Bearss is like comparing Jack Nicklaus to Jack Fleck. The odd thing is that as magnificent a writer as Foote was when it came to non-fiction he was blandly average as a writer of fiction. It’s odd and somewhat sad since Foote always aspired to be a novelist.
It nearly pains me to watch Plato hit the road but as often as I find myself thinking about or speaking about the dialectic or quoting some obscure line from the Phaedo I haven’t picked the book up in years. Plato’s good and stuck in my head so the need to have him sitting on my bookshelf has lessened. The book on Aquinas was easy to set adrift.
George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith is the single most difficult to read book I have ever come across. Most folks hit the wall harder with Kant but Santayana had me pinned. I’d catch myself reading the same half-page again and again hoping my brain might gain some intellectual traction. Way back when, I might have gotten some of it but I tried reading a few pages the other day and I nearly got lightheaded.
The editing books are mere works of reference and paper references (about the use of words and language, anyway) have been rendered superfluous by the presence of Google beneath our fingertips. Yes, I do still have the last dictionary I ever bought. It’s an Oxford Concise and I reach for it a couple times a week. But, those books on style and usage have long outstayed their usefulness to me. I won’t miss them.
Geez, that Jon Krakauer’s a good writer. I loved Into Thin Air but I keep getting derailed from finishing Under the Banner of Heaven. Talk about a gift for prose. Talk about energy. Talk about clarity of narrative. Krakauer is reputed to be rather petulant kind of guy, trending toward self-righteousness, but he is an amazing writer. I’d love to have a beer with him.
From time to time I’ve enjoyed reading a little of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa if only to remind myself that even great writers can come across as merely average and totally mortal. Though some of the stories are amusing, this was an easy one to get rid of.
I know what you’re asking yourself; how the hell does guy get rid of his Idiots Guide to the Pilates Method, a retrospective on Speed Racer, the Diaries of Kafka and a book about swearing? It’s a head scratcher for sure but they’re outta here.
You know, the more I think about I’m pretty sure there’s still room on my bookshelf for the Speed Racer book.
Paul Cervantes 