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September 17, 2002

My Computer, My Self

You say "AI," I say "Aiieee!"

by Ian Shoales

Since 1984, an Austin, Texas company called Cycorp Inc. has been working on a database named Cyc (pronounced "psych"), which will emulate common sense.

According to the Associated Press (San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2002), the company has fed Cyc "1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires immense physical effort."

What a Conversationalist!

I don't know if the resulting computer would be entirely convincing as a human. At the very least, it would come off as a bizarre bore you wouldn't want to be stuck with at a party, spouting trivia at random to nobody in particular: "You can tell the sex of spiders from their pedipalps! Thixotropy is the rate of change of viscosity over time! All mammals except platypi and spiny anteaters have bellybuttons!" It would have people edging away, smiling nervously, and checking their watches.

If you go to Cyc's Web site, you can find more things that Cyc "knows," including "trees are usually outdoors, once people die they stop buying things, and glasses of liquid should be carried right side-up."

Reading this last, I'm a little dismayed to realize that Cyc may have more sense than I do, judging by the number of times I've spilled glasses of liquid in my life.

What Versatility!

According to the article, Cyc has many applications: "It could annotate emails to put them in better context for their recipients, serve as an instant language translator, even offer humans advice from varying points of view."

That's fine, although I don't know if I want my computer telling me not to put my head in a crocodile's mouth or run with scissors.

And again, Cyc still seems a little wonkish, along the lines of a Mr. Spock or Sherlock Holmes — the kind of person who can do the crossword puzzle in three minutes, solve a mystery three pages in, and tell you, no matter what you're doing, precisely how you're doing it wrong. Irritating, in a word.

But No Blue Frogs

I'll concede that someday there will be a machine that's smarter, wiser, and more humane than humans. It wouldn't take much. But what about the great leaps in logic that humans make with great frequency? Will a machine be able to do that?

When I was a kid, for instance, I had a dream in which I had discovered the secret to life. Excited yet bleary, I woke up and wrote it down. In the morning, I picked up the pad to discover I had written, "The frog is blue." Blue was capitalized and underlined, and there were three exclamation marks after the sentence. Clearly, my subconscious was writing checks my conscious mind couldn't cash, if you know what I mean.

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What's my point? If we really want a computer to be human, it needs a database full of doubt. We need a computer that would respond to queries with, "Boy, that's a tough one," "Beats me," "Just a sec, it's on the tip of my tongue," "Let me get back to you on that," or even "The frog is BLUE!!!"

And if it possessed some information that was just plain wrong, but stubbornly insisted it was correct — well, how human is that? "I'm telling you Marlon Brando won Best Actor in 1983," "You turn left there, I'm sure of it," "Thomas Jefferson invented the stovepipe hat. Wanna bet?"

After all, to err is human. To put it in logical terms, if it's not blue, it's not a frog. Q.E.D.

Ian Shoales is a writer in San Francisco. Alas, he's all too human.