{"id":335,"date":"2015-10-30T23:30:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-31T03:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=335"},"modified":"2015-10-30T13:17:29","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T17:17:29","slug":"thinking-and-language-ex-machina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=335","title":{"rendered":"Thinking and Language Ex Machina"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had an occasion recently to watch the new science fiction movie called Ex Machina<\/em>.\u00a0 While the movie was okay there were some interesting points raised that are worth at least a brief commentary.<\/p>\n

The story centers around a genius computer scientist\/programmer\/inventor (enough\u2026 you get the picture) by the name of Nathan.\u00a0 He\u2019s some sort of strange mix between Elon Musk, Tony Stark, and Sergey Brin, who he most physically resembles and is clearly patterned after in terms of backstory.\u00a0 It seems that Nathan\u2019s invented an artificially intelligent \u2018woman\u2019 by the name of Ava who he wants to subject to a Turing Test.\u00a0 However, no simply dialog version of the Turing Test is good enough for Nathan and he recruits a bright employee, by name Caleb (no one has a last name in this movie), from his multi-national company to administer a super version of the test.\u00a0 The problem is that Caleb can\u2019t know the real nature of the test since Nathan wants to see if Ava can elicit a real emotional connection with Caleb. And thus begins a psychological thriller that starts with Nathan manipulating the interactions between Ava and Caleb and ends with the question of just who is manipulating whom.\u00a0 Overall the movie is mostly telegraphed and predictable, ending with the usual but unspoken admonition that there are certain things man is not meant to mess with \u2013 certain genies that once let out of the bottle are impossible to recapture.\u00a0 Nonetheless, a few ideas stood out as intriguing.<\/p>\n

About a third of the way into the movie, Nathan takes to explaining some of the technical details to an eager Caleb \u2013 details on just how Nathan was able to model such a human looking Ava.\u00a0 The two major technical challenges discussed where making her speech natural and making her thinking adaptable.\u00a0 Nathan says he solved the natural language problem by eavesdropping on every cell-phone conversation and using all those data as a reference (perhaps by training a neural net \u2013 the fine points weren\u2019t discussed).\u00a0 One the thinking front, he claims to have watched how web surfers travel through the World Wide Web.<\/p>\n

Most of us expect that our journeys in cyberspace are quietly monitored by big-data marketers, salivating to see what we are interested in and thereby serve up those \u2018customers who purchased x also purchased y\u2019 prompts.\u00a0 What is tantalizing how the discussion in Ex Machina<\/em> is the idea that Nathan wasn\u2019t interesting in what they users were viewing on the web but how they were viewing the web.\u00a0 In other words, the patterns of clicks and views reveal more about how we think than what we think.<\/p>\n

The discussion reminded me of a game I am fond of playing.\u00a0 There is no winning or losing.\u00a0 All that is required is for each participant to say a single word that comes into their min based on the word previously uttered.\u00a0 Obviously, someone starts with an arbitrary word but from then on it is link by link by link.\u00a0 Any player is allowed to challenge a word uttered by another player for an explanation on how it links with the previous word.\u00a0 Most players start reluctantly and soon join in with enthusiasm and I have found it to be a great way to gain insight on how friends and family think.<\/p>\n

The technique that Nathan is discussing is like the game described above (it has no formal name) writ large.\u00a0 Analysis of how people link pages and images together is yet another facet of that ongoing debate over how much does language affect thinking versus how thinking affects language.\u00a0 Except in this context, the answers are no longing strictly couched in terms of philosophical arguments and mathematical hypotheses.\u00a0 Suddenly, with this subtle but significant shift in thought, new vistas open where linguistics can truly be tackled in an experimental framework.\u00a0 The possibilities are staggering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had an occasion recently to watch the new science fiction movie called Ex Machina.\u00a0 While the movie was okay there were some interesting points raised that are worth at… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}