Reading the Bloomberg article on nlp comprehension.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. put its deep neural network model through its paces last week, asking the AI to provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions comprising a quiz that’s considered one of the world’s most authoritative machine-reading gauges. The model developed by Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science of Technologies scored 82.44, edging past the 82.304 that rival humans achieved.

What is notable to me is that in this instance, these questions can only have one answer, to be correct.

The quiz itself is based on wikipedia articles. Remember when you would never let your students use wikipedia as a source?

As the Bloomberg article notes, NLP ‘mimics’ human comprehension.  The underlying belief is that the machines can answer objective questions.

“That means objective questions such as ‘what causes rain’ can now be answered with high accuracy by machines,” Luo Si, chief scientist for natural language processing at the Alibaba institute, said in a statement.

Functionality and thus comprehension and correctness is based on a binary model of knowledge, and is using wikipedia for the source of correct. Much about that sentence is complicated, from my perspective. The binary model of correctness allows for no nuance, and is based on those who have the power to control the narrative. No alternate views, no other models.

It reminds me of taking standardized tests, when none of the answers seemed exactly correct, and I spent my test taking time trying to imagine which one the test makers believed to be correct. I was forced to fit into the culture of the creators of the exam. Extending this out to what it means that machines ‘know’ and allowing them to provide authoritative answers seems reductive, dangerous, and seems to be moving ahead apace.

As we sit here this morning, I am reading of Berber languages, and W is reading of Sumer and Akkadian.

Berber, and the Tamasheq variant that particularly interests me, has had a long life as an oral language.  Sumerian is one of the first known written languages, and while there is a sample of someone reading Gilgamesh in Akkadian, it was a language that was dead long ago, and we modern humans really do not know what it sounds like. The recreation, however, is beautiful.

Many of the languages which die off are oral languages, the last speakers die, and thus the language goes with it. This has long been a concern of linguists, and the popular press doesn’t seem to make it through a year without a piece about it as well.

The rise of social media based on images, the use of video, and the use of emoji are all interesting language shifts at play now. It is difficult to make any long ranging assumptions, but that makes it no less interesting than to watch younger demographics (in particular) prefer to engage with English in its oral form. Not just the in-person conversations that have always existed (and it may be argued that the in-person is diminishing) but the endless youtube videos and channels with millions of followers.  The language variations spoken by many of these English speakers are certainly not the written language that we find in standard texts, lexically and grammatically.  The use of emoji shifts English to a pictographic language, rather than a symbol corresponding to a sound, it corresponds to a concept or an idea.

There are thus, interesting ideas about the future of the visual language, both photographic and iconic/ideographic, which I am not going to touch at this time.

What I wonder however, if there will be an orality of language that is prioritized in the future, that shifts the current power and status dynamic in which unwritten languages are a lesser language, an archaic form from a culture which has ‘failed to develop’ despite the many ways in which the more oral languages do have advantages in a cultural context.

Imagining a world in which oral English is how stories are shared, that this access to the storytellers is required, beyond books, to belong, to understand, is a world we have, perhaps, never lived in, not in the modern English that we speak now. It would have been centuries since English was predominately oral, and it was an earlier version of English. Back to the time of the bards, except this time around, our bards will be digital.

To start, each constructs bilingual dictionaries without the aid of a human teacher telling them when their guesses are right. That’s possible because languages have strong similarities in the ways words cluster around one another. The words for table and chair, for example, are frequently used together in all languages.

So how does the computer know that table and chair are often used together? What about cultures that do not have chairs, but do have tables?  How is the computer mapping co-occurances that have a significant variation by culture, or simply do not exist?

This article uses Chinese and Arabic as the example languages for mapping. The underlying cultural principles are rather different, for community, behaviors, constructs, and as these are mapping IN language, does one become more like the other? Does the machine create an Arabic with Chinese sentiments? [The papers use French and English, which are much more similar, culturally and linguistically.]

Treating language like math is not going to turn out well. Though I haven’t yet read the papers that support these assumptions.

Back to my regularly repeated statement: machine translation and language that does not address the significant cultural components of language, as communication, as culture, as transfer mode of ideology, will, in the end, create a different or new culture, and now would be a very good time to be paying more attention to this.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/artificial-intelligence-goes-bilingual-without-dictionary

In a recent Atlantic article “Should Children Form Emotional Bonds With Robots” this:

Shut your phone off, and Cozmo shuts down too.

Another example of human affordances to the machine. In order to have your robot work, you must leave your phone on at all times.

Many of the articles note that the machines are making moves that humans have never made.  Both in the original, AlphaGo Lee, and in the evolved, AlphaGo Zero, we see games that “no human has ever played.”

So many questions

1. How do we know no human has ever played it?
2. Is the cultural ritual surrounding Go such that as one learns, there is an expectation to adherence of tradition which a human would not diverge from?
3. How do aesthetics play into the success of the machines? (I remember from learning Go decades ago that this mattered, but have read nothing about the aesthetics of the machines’ games. Caveat: I haven’t played in 20 years so what do I know?)
4. Is there any difference than the first principles as given to the machines than those given to humans?
5. Are the games played by the machines admired by the top humans?
6. Is it expected that humans are learning from the machines and that human/human games will now be played differently?

Reading Mar’s article today, I find myself re-reading a collection of older articles and wondering about Kate Darling‘s work, sexbots, hitchhiking robots and Ishiguro’s androids.

Are humans more likely to kill/maim/rape/injure human-looking/-seeming machines over non-human ones.

• Alex Mar’s Love in the Time of Robots
• What Interacting with Robots Might Reveal about Human Nature
• Empathic Concern and the Effect of Stories in Human-Robot Interaction
• Articles on the sexbot ‘abused’ at the Linz art festival (Though I may hate to really understand what ‘normal wear’ is.)
• The demise of HitchBot
   

The follwing is from Bill Joy‘s 2000 article in Wired, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us”

In his history of such ideas, Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

Any thoughts / insights into why Dyson believes this?

Melville House has published Lynda Schuster’s book about being a war correspondent. Here it the marketing copy they have opted for:

Because being a war correspondent, if you are a woman, is all about self-discovery. The longer description includes the word grief, the other thing that gives women permission to write about ways of life that don’t align with the expectations of our current world.

I missed dawn yoga today, sidetracked by Dante. So, let me do the same to you.

Inferno, Canto I
Dante Alighieri, 1265 – 1321

Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously.

And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

After my weary body I had rested,
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!

And never moved she from before my face,
Nay, rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.

The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine

At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,

The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lion’s aspect which appeared to me.

He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;

And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness,
And many folk has caused to live forlorn!

She brought upon me so much heaviness,
With the affright that from her aspect came,
That I the hope relinquished of the height.

And as he is who willingly acquires,
And the time comes that causes him to lose,
Who weeps in all his thoughts and is despondent,

E’en such made me that beast withouten peace,
Which, coming on against me by degrees
Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent.

While I was rushing downward to the lowland,
Before mine eyes did one present himself,
Who seemed from long-continued silence hoarse.

When I beheld him in the desert vast,
“Have pity on me,” unto him I cried,
“Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by country both of them.

‘Sub Julio’ was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned.

But thou, why goest thou back to such annoyance?
Why climb’st thou not the Mount Delectable,
Which is the source and cause of every joy?”

“Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain
Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?”
I made response to him with bashful forehead.

“O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
That have impelled me to explore thy volume!

Thou art my master, and my author thou,
Thou art alone the one from whom I took
The beautiful style that has done honour to me.

Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.”

“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape;

Because this beast, at which thou criest out,
Suffers not any one to pass her way,
But so doth harass him, that she destroys him;

And has a nature so malign and ruthless,
That never doth she glut her greedy will,
And after food is hungrier than before.

Many the animals with whom she weds,
And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound
Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

He shall not feed on either earth or pelf,
But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue;
‘Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be;

Of that low Italy shall he be the saviour,
On whose account the maid Camilla died,
Euryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds;

Through every city shall he hunt her down,
Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,
There from whence envy first did let her loose.

Therefore I think and judge it for thy best
Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide,
And lead thee hence through the eternal place,

Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
Who cry out each one for the second death;

And thou shalt see those who contented are
Within the fire, because they hope to come,
Whene’er it may be, to the blessed people;

To whom, then, if thou wishest to ascend,
A soul shall be for that than I more worthy;
With her at my departure I will leave thee;

Because that Emperor, who reigns above,
In that I was rebellious to his law,
Wills that through me none come into his city.

He governs everywhere, and there he reigns;
There is his city and his lofty throne;
O happy he whom thereto he elects!”

And I to him: “Poet, I thee entreat,
By that same God whom thou didst never know,
So that I may escape this woe and worse,

Thou wouldst conduct me there where thou hast said,
That I may see the portal of Saint Peter,
And those thou makest so disconsolate.”

Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.

“In old tales — and usually in our new ones too — no one becomes invisible without a motive. It’s the peculiarity of our times that we focus on means and not the motive.” Philip Ball, Invisible.

I hadn’t really considered this, means versus motive in our modern era, til this bit of Ball’s book.  I suppose in the past, when means was unknown, or guessed at, or fabricated, motive could have been less slippery? With the changes in technology and science in the past millenia, we know more about means, though really, still far less than we think we know.

Do we head more towards the how than the why, in our modern enquiries?