Human Artificial Intelligence.

A Japanese woman demonstrated an AI robot that could easily pass an entrance exam to a top university. She wasn’t excited as you might expect but worried because she knew her robot had zero understanding of what it was doing. It simply looked words up in Wikipedia, statistically analysed related words and chose the highest probability answers. That’s basically what all AI does. Though it can analyse language a thousand times faster than a human it doesn’t ‘read’ its meaning it runs maths on the words as simply numerical values. Now I passed a similar exam and went to uni. I spent three years learning maths and physics and got a degree. So far so good. Then I went into industry and quickly learnt I didn’t know a thing. I had artificial intelligence. Luckily I had acquired experience and cunning elsewhere and quickly assimilated the two into useful real intelligence but many, often those who got good degrees, persisted with their version of AI and though they got good jobs they didn’t often move things forward. They only knew how to think inside the box. (think Rick Astley compared to Queen, Michael Jackson or the Beatles) The corollary of the above demonstration is that our current form of education is teaching kids to achieve what artificial intelligence can do a thousand times better, i.e. regurgitate facts and choose the right tick box. We’re teaching our kids to come a distant second to a laptop. Already algorithms and AI are being used to coerce us mere humans into doing their will, well the will of their owners, and it can’t be long before their owners are relying in them coerce themselves. For what it’s worth learn to think upside-down. Take a problem or a set of facts and turn them upside-down, throw them up in the air and see how they land like a snow globe. Put together unrelated facts, an unrelated use, a different material over and over till an answer appeals. AI can’t do that because it doesn’t understand. 

Remembering Tommy.

1969, I was twenty six sharing a flat with Sam Wanamaker’s daughter in Highgate, babysitting little sister Zoe and dating their Swiss au pair Anne Marie. And The Who released Tommy. Later at the famous London folk club, Les Cousins, the guy singing was wailing about his ex, Cherry, who was, well sitting next to me. Looking back it was verging on the exotic but at the time it was just life. And I listened to Tommy. And that line, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me” reverberated in my emotional space like the tingle of a feather touching my own deaf, dumb and blind kid. Not of course in the usual sense but somewhere I knew life was at arms length even though I was in the midst of it. I was immersed but not getting wet. I’ve recognised that distance time and time again from some fear, some impinging belief, some involving abstraction, always knowing a closer connection was possible. And listening to Tommy somehow summed this all up and gave a lift to the possibility, that is until some toe rag broke into my flat and stole it. This is The Who playing it live in Los Angeles in 1989, one amazing hour of musicianship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0fOyoyOlE Art is always elusive and the narrative of Tommy is no exception. It’s confusing because to the deaf, dumb and blind their processes of understanding cannot reach it. It exists as a flavour, a taste, a blurred emotion, as conflicting images that in seeing resolve themselves, in hearing make sense without understanding. Much later in therapist training we tried to unravel the processes of damage, of help, of resolution and sure there are endless books on the subtle mechanics of it all but for me at least in the end it comes down to art and the reckless rock and roll energy of Tommy, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me”.