I was having a conversation with a friend this evening about A.I. He was expressing how amazing it is that you can have what feels like a perfectly intelligent conversation with one of today’s chatbots.
The chatbot will generally understand what you say, and will usually give cogent and insightful responses. He was expressing wonderment that a mere machine can do that.
Our conversation reminded me of an experience I had many years ago at the annual Siggraph computer graphics conference. Just before the film show, there was an audience experiment.
Everyone in the audience was given a ping pong paddle which was green on one side, and red on the other. In the back of the auditorium was a video camera, which fed into a computer that figured out which way each audience member’s paddle was facing.
At one point the audience was divided into left and right half, and we collectively played a game of Pong. The left half of the audience controlled the left player’s Pong paddle (green face-forward for up, red face-forward for down), and the right half of the audience controlled the right player’s Pong paddle.
The game started out slow, but then got faster and faster. No matter how fast it went, the audience played a perfect game — at speeds much faster than any single human being could have matched.
To me, this provides the key insight into why those chatbots seem so intelligent. More tomorrow.