{"id":5297,"date":"2014-11-09T09:30:17","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T16:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5297"},"modified":"2014-11-10T10:10:46","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T17:10:46","slug":"thinking-straight-and-crooked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5297","title":{"rendered":"Thinking, straight and crooked"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bugs\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Computers think straight. People think crookedly. Despite all the frustrations that come with thinking crookedly, we have it much better than our calculating kin. Thinking crookedly is more interesting, more rewarding, flat-out more fun\u00a0than thinking straight. Emotion, pleasure, art, ingenuity, daring, wit, funkiness, love: pretty much everything good is a byproduct of crooked thinking. To think crookedly \u2014 to be conscious and self-aware and kind of fucked-up \u2014 is a harder feat by far than to think straight. That’s why it’s been fairly easy for us to get machines to think straight, while we still have no idea how to get them to think crookedly.<\/p>\n

“Certainly if you had … an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off,” Sergey Brin once\u00a0said<\/a>. Certainly Sergey Brin was\u00a0wrong. He\u00a0was thinking too straight. The conscious human mind\u00a0is buggy, impurely smart, and that’s its greatest feature.<\/p>\n

Still, thinking straight, really<\/em> straight, is a useful skill. After all, it provides a perfect\u00a0complement to our own way of thinking. That’s why we made computers, and it’s why computers are so valuable in so many situations. For a crooked thinker, there’s nothing like being able to call on a straight thinker from time to time.<\/p>\n

In an essay<\/a> about artificial intelligence in Wired<\/em>, Kevin Kelly makes an incisive point: for computers, consciousness would be a disaster\u00a0\u2014 a bug-as-bug,\u00a0not a bug-as-feature.\u00a0What we want our AI aides to be, writes Kelly, are “nerdily autistic, supersmart specialists”:<\/p>\n

In fact, this won’t really be intelligence, at least not as we’ve come to think of it. Indeed, intelligence may be a liability \u2014 especially if by \u201cintelligence\u201d we mean our peculiar self-awareness, all our frantic loops of introspection and messy currents of self-consciousness. We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage. The synthetic Dr. Watson at our hospital should be maniacal in its work, never wondering whether it should have majored in English instead. As AIs develop, we might have to engineer ways to\u00a0prevent<\/em>\u00a0consciousness in them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All along, our all-too-human AI boffins have been pursuing the wrong\u00a0goal. If the value of our computers lies in the complementary nature of their intelligence, the last thing we’d want to do is turn them into crooked thinkers like ourselves. Who wants a fucked-up computer?<\/p>\n

Image: TempusVolat<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Computers think straight. People think crookedly. Despite all the frustrations that come with thinking crookedly, we have it much better than our calculating kin. Thinking crookedly is more interesting, more rewarding, flat-out more fun\u00a0than thinking straight. Emotion, pleasure, art, ingenuity, daring, wit, funkiness, love: pretty much everything good is a byproduct of crooked thinking. To […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5297"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5305,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5297\/revisions\/5305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}