[FRIAM] A* and emulatoin

[Jochen Fromm]

There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday. Hope you are OK? Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too warm for this season. We have July temperatures in June. Probably another sign of climate changehttps://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> Date: 6/26/22  09:16  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin 
    This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble
      membrane first thing this morning (CET):
    
       
https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099
    which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here
      of late.  It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but
      useful?) the Turing Test is.  The TT represents precisely "the
      glitch".    I think this idea points in the general direction of
      conscious empathy...   if we recognize language fluency *as*
      mental fluency, then it is more obvious that we would grant others
      who present language fluency as being similar to ourselves,
      possibly assuming that "other" is closer to "not other" simply
      because of the familiar language that flows out of us.   
    
    In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a
      half-dozen languages with half as many accents/dialects each... 
      In english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here and
      there but the accent referenced it with every lilt.   This was not
      unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same", but in
      Wales, the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and the
      romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was overwhelmingly
      unfamiliar.  When I read a sign, I felt like I was left with a
      mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had to spit out just
      to clear my vocal passage to start on the next phrase.
      It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues
      struggling with the various anglifications of the hispanification
      of a dozen different native American languages (starting in my
      neighborhood with Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding out withe Keres and
      Dine' and Zuni ...)  The (nearly conventional/normalized)
      rendering of most of these languages is for me familiar enough
      that I don't struggle or wince, but after (especially Welsh)... "I
      get it".   When confronted with each British accent (I couldn't
      identify or distinguish many if any) it took a few hours at least
      to become habituated enough to not be disturbed (intrigued or put
      off, depending) by the unfamiliar sound patterns and often
      idiomatic constructions.  
    
     I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I
      did Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections
      between Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin
      words/phrases in science made it much more familiar than French. 
      The tiny bit of French I think I am habituated to are a few
      Americanized stock phrases and maybe a very little bit of dialogue
      from movies...  After a week of hearing almost nothing *but*
      French it no longer felt outrageously "Other" even if I couldn't
      hardly parse a thing out of a run-together-spoken-phrase.   Mary
      and I observed one another trying to speak English to someone who
      did not speak much if any and we realized that we were both prone
      to repeat the same sentence with a word choice or two changed, but
      more emphatically (and therefore more run-together) each time.  
      Not helpful, and perhaps what the few French who bothered to speak
      to us once it was established that we had no language in common,
      were doing themselves.   It was hard to recognize even word-breaks
      in the word-salad coming at us.    The little German we were
      exposed to had a *different* set of familiar words and sounds and
      I think the English and German might have a much stronger phonemic
      overlap, making it not sound quite as foreign... though I was left
      wanting to clear my throat after hearing much spoken german... 
      and then here in the Netherlands with *many*
      English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more
      comfortable...   and much of the written Dutch is familiar even
      when the pronunciation is a git foreign.
    
    
      https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special
    
    In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this
      article which was a bit more interesting to me.   The point they
      make about human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks
      differently (acutely illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf
      and dumb" or "dumb-mute" for those who could not speak (due to
      deafness, aphasia, or perhaps some trauma?   The line from the
      Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard comes to mind:  "That deaf,
      dumb and blind kid, could sure play a mean pin ballll!"   
    
    A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was:  "Don't
      mistake an accent for a personality"...
    
    It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
      discussing AI, etc.  A* really.   Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
      Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum.   And yet it is useful (I think)
      to note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at
      the same time.   Each is a facet or reflection of the other.   The
      second article seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I
      think more aptly "emotional knowledge".    My very first (and
      practically only) published "artpiece"  was a visual study on the
      distinction between "knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI
      climbing the steep part of the hill toward a pinnacle (or more
      likely series of false summits) of "knowing about" without
      possibly getting at all any closer (at all) to "knowing". 
    
    This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is
      learning anything more than imitation/emulation?"
    Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I
      find that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people
      is, in fact, with their bureaucratic roles.  I am seeking a
      transaction... knowledge, information, material goods, a
      service.   And given the level of the mutual (mis)understanding
      I've been enduring for over a month now in those transactions, It
      now feels like a luxury to expect a service person to articulate
      their preferences and basis of their preferences in a given baked
      good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even (gawdess forbid) Beer!   
      But it has trained me to "listen for emotional content" more than
      substance.   If I ask for a "Blonde" or a "Bruun" or a "Trippel"
      or a "Wit" and they rattle off something about one or more of
      them, I will choose one based on the level of excitement in their
      voice-eye over any imagined information content their response
      implied.   I am sometimes disappointed but almost always
      surprised.   The vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to
      language) what I am familiar with amongst American Craft beers but
      my exploration is wider (through clumsiness if nothing else).   My
      best strategy is simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed
      locally".  Also a good strategy for food it seems.
    
  

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