Hi everyone,
I came across this TED Talk today and was wondering if any of you may have seen it and what your thoughts were on it. It is last year’s talk by Tom Gruber (co-creator of Siri) on the topic of [what he calls] Humanistic AI.
First off, what I find interesting is that our community here is focused on humane technology and we all seem to understand that to mean using less technology and spending more time with other humans. In Mr. Gruber’s case humanistic AI seems to mean more tech reaching more people.
My other thoughts on his talk were that, calling human memory a “cognitive limitation” and saying that it should be made to be as good as a computer’s memory, seem pretty arrogant statements to make. Our memory exists in the form that it does today because of millenia of evolution and adaptation; we don’t remember everything we see and hear because we are not supposed to. The brain uses incredible amounts of energy and attuning to every single stimulus in the present AND past would short circuit it. That, of course, doesn’t mean that it is perfect, far from it.
And speaking of being attentive, present and focused, if we were to save ALL of our memories, where would we ‘keep’ them, what would be the actual purpose of that and what would that mean in terms of where our attention would go? Presumably the long-view of this is that there would be some kind of app that would collect, summarize and make sense of our memories? The number of ethical considerations there is practically limitless. I find it interesting that he mentions at one point, in a somewhat jarring way, that all memories should absolutely be kept personal. This kind of memory collection, storage and processing would make privacy extremely vulnerable.
These were some of the thoughts that crossed my mind as I was watching this talk. Would be curious to know what you think!
Have a great day everyone.
Teodora