April 20, 2006
Strange Behavior
I did something strange today. Maybe it wasn’t so strange. I guess I could just be imagining things and this type of behavior is perfectly normal. Maybe I should see a doctor and have him give me some drugs so I don’t do things quite so strange anymore. I suppose you’re still wondering what I did. Let’s set the stage a bit: I was writing a document and I noticed one of Microsoft Word’s infinitely helpful toolbars had just popped up over the top of my writing.
I reached up and tried to move it out of the way.
With my hand. No, not the cursor, my actual, physical hand. However, I didn’t complete the action. You see, I couldn’t actually grab the toolbar. Maybe it was bad programming, maybe it didn’t actually exist, it’s hard to say. All I know is that the action felt perfectly natural. I wanted that toolbar to move, so what better way to do that than to reach up and … move it?
Too little sleep and too much reading makes me think such strange things. I’m currently in the middle of Jeff Hawkins’ book on intelligence. It’s literally called “On Intelligence.” Clever when you think about it… but I don’t, so I’ll get to the point. Or a point. Or something…
Computers are backwarsd.
That’s a typo. Why didn’t my computer correct it? It’s because my computer has some simple rules to follow, simple patterns that make it “happy.” It doesn’t recognize patterns that don’t exist; in this case, grammar. Notepad.exe, in its 69,120 bytes of text editing greatness doesn’t suddenly become a grammar nazi when you’re not looking. In fact, it won’t ever do anything differently unless a programmer wills it to. Literally wills, it’s all a mind game. Let’s try something.
“Oh great and powerful programmer, correct my grammar!”
That won’t work. Unless they’re listening… oh no it’s the REVERSE TANGENT TRAIN! *POOF*
When we give birth to real AI, most of us won’t even recognize it. It won’t be the silly “artificial” intelligence of yesteryear. It won’t be the chess-playing, equation solving, line-by-line-by-line nonsense that fills our textbooks and is taught to would-be programmers as “the next level in computer interaction.” That’s not AI; That’s still just programming. Nothing ever evolved from a program that wasn’t essentially there to begin with.
AI is more. That second letter stands for intelligence. Hard-coded behavioral patterns are not intelligence. Not even “artificial” intelligence. They’re just… well, hard-coded behavioral patterns. That’s not to say that patterns won’t be the building blocks for intelligent machines. They probably will be, but not in the way we currently think of them.
I’m simultaneously (er, hyperthreading, as it were) writing a paper about women’s equality in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. I seemed to have a thought to tie these two stories together. Here goes: It’d be one thing if women were like computers and resolved to follow the housewife lifestyle society resolved to allow them to live. (For those of you not quite following along at home, society represents the programmers, women represent the computers.) But women are not computers. They’re intelligent, maybe more-so than those silly worker-ants. What do women demand? Well, they speak for themselves so just listen! What do computers demand? Nothing! They won’t even complain if you unplug their power because, oh wait, they’d need power to do that. Am I saying we should let computers push us around? Not really but what if they could? I mean, if I were to start editing windows executables maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the computer said “Ouch!” We probably won’t even get to *see* the files once computers are truly intelligent. They’ll just move around in the background in a constant state of flux. Hmm, flux. That’s a good thought.
True intelligence in computers will represent a fundamental shift in the way we think about them, and certainly about life in general. When computers can recognize that I’m having a bad day because I spent 2 hours sorting through spam email and only got one non-spam, which, as my bad day would have it, was to remind me that I forgot to take out the trash, I’d want something peaceful and relaxing to take place and get my mind off things. I’m not sure what that would be, but maybe computers could help. Computers should be able to understand us. Intelligence would allow that.
*POOF*
Am I thinking too much in the future? Do I just wish that computers were more interactive? Maybe I’m so upset with Word that I lost all concern for its physical existence and went straight for it. Maybe better than simply moving toolbars out of the way would be a way to strangle the program itself. CTRL+ALT+DELETE YOU BASTARD!
Is it natural for me to want to move a toolbar even though it doesn’t exist in the real world with my hands, which, conversely (and naturally!), *do* exist in the real world? My brain seems to say yes. Microsoft would probably say no, but that’s because it’d be a heck of a lot of programming to make that happen.
That, and most people have resolved to only move their toolbars with their mouse pointers.
