Non-digitizable things
A bunch of things lately have really got me thinking about what human qualities can and cannot be digitized. (This is inbetween more mundane tasks like shopping for winter tires. I’ll bet Greek philosophers didn’t have to shop for winter tires right in the middle of theorizing. Geez.)
Here’s a list of things that cannot be digitized:
* Sensation. Many people have been working on this for decades — vision, voice reco, smell, tactile, taste — with slow progress. I do think this will eventually be cracked for many practical applications. But not all?
* Aesthetic appreciation, e.g. of art, music, sunset, poetry, that sound you hear in sea shells
* Emotion
* Creativity
* Dialog. Remember Eliza? I wonder what the state of the art is now. Not much better I’ll bet, because you need…
* Understanding of context. Surely there is a shorter word for this concept? Lack of contextual comprehension is the reason voice recognition is stuck at 95%.
* Consciousness. Although reading wikipedia’s definition, I think humans are losing ground to machines on some aspects of consciousness. [5 minutes pass….] Wow, it’s worth reading that definition and just spending a few minutes clicking the outbound links from it.
So we still have some high ground on the algorithms. But the list is disconcertingly short! And it isn’t normalized; “consciousness” seems like it subsumes so many other things. What have I missed? Help me make a better list, or point me to someone who already has.
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SeanO said,
December 1, 2005 @ 9:08 pm
Hey Oshoma,
I think you’re right, in that “consciousness” might be the heading for the 5 items above it. If consciousness can be sparked in machines, I think these other things on your list may just start to emerge. They seem to be so strongly connected to all of our past experiences, which are typically processed by our “consciousness”. I wonder how a person would react, not ever having listened to a scrap of music, when played an exerpt from Beethoven’s 5th. Would it sound like noise, or could they somehow appreciate it? Very interesting stuff. (I’ve dogeared the Wikipedia article.)
Oshoma Momoh said,
December 5, 2005 @ 11:09 am
I suspect they would perceive something beautiful in Beethoven… there’s a nature vs. nurture argument in there. And I agree, consciousness is a precondition for most of the things on the list, aside from sensation. (You ought to be able to sense things digitally, you just won’t appreciate or understand them the same way a human does.) But I wonder if you can get snippets of creativity, say, without “full” consciousness. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
My Own Pirate Radio » What Can People Do That Computers Can’t? said,
May 9, 2006 @ 9:18 am
[…] Amazon launched Mechanical Turk late in 2005. It really got me thinking about what types of tasks are undigitizable, the interplay between collective intelligence and outsourcing, and related ethics and economics issues including worker conditions and incentives. It’s interesting to see concrete examples of people working in this area and exploring all these issues in great depth. For example, here is how Benjamin Hill approaches the space: BH: …We’ve started to think of the whole knowledge workspace as divided on one axis along people’s opinions all the way to things that are absolute. Like people’s opinions would be “tag the image”, absolute would be “OCR check this one line of text”. There’s one correct answer versus “it really matters what people thing” and then along another axis we’ve got everything from easy where it just takes a few seconds of time, all the way up to very difficult where it takes a longer amount of time. If you can imagine both Mycroft and CastingWords occupying different bubbled areas of that knowledge workspace, so actually we’re going after different targets and I think both have a lot of value at that point. […]