WHAT AI CAN LEARN FROM ROMEO & JULIET
By Doug Lenat
When someone talks about “AI”, today, they are referring to one particular type of AI: multi-layer neural nets trained on big data to recognize patterns. These so-called “deep learning” algorithms are great at learning more or less the same sort of stimulus/response functionality that our right brain hemispheres carry out – what Daniel Kahneman calls “thinking fast”. This is also what the entire brains of most animals do. So a better name for them might be AAI’s, for Artificial Animal Intelligences. In my last Forbes article (Not Good As Gold: Today’s AI’s Are Dangerously Lacking In AU (Artificial Understanding)) I argued that almost all of today’s AI’s have little or no left brain function – logical, causal, “thinking slowly”. Homo sapiens pays a huge price for having an over-sized bicameral brain (high birthing pain and risk) but upon reflection it’s worth it — in particular, you or I couldn’t perform such reflection without it! Our ability to generate alternative possibilities, to rationally construct and consider pro- and con- arguments for and against each proposition, is clearly worth it. At least for decisions that are important to us.
