Conversation

Thought experiment: UX zombie All knowledge is embodied in visual-tactile UIs like Bret Victor stuff All math/ logic is done by AIs All affective communication is Darmok-like allegory transmitted via iconic imagery (like reaction gifs, emoji) What’s left for language to do?
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A machine learning buddy of mine argues that the hidden layer patterns of deep neural nets represent crypto-concepts in what is effectively a language we don’t understand and that AI is disrupting language.
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It’s a great refactoring of “explainable AI” It’s not that we can’t explain their behavior. It’s that we can’t even think in the language internal to them. It’s like trying to translate a modern language text like say Wikipedia into a Paleolithic grunt language
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This is a joke in fiction, almost a trope Marklar language in South Park (all nouns are marklar) The librarian’s ook-ook language in discworld (all words are ook)
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Clickbait might be most advanced language we have Remember the demand media era content loop? That didn’t go away, it just got better: 1. Use AI to find search patterns 2. Pay minimum wage types to write formulaic SEO-laden texts 3. Capture search attention for ads Step 2 = AI
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Every media era produces a culture of content packaging. All the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books were churned out by a syndicate of authors operating under the names Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, using a formula. It’s hilarious. I totally didn’t suspect it as a kid.
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Then you have Hollywood Save the Cat scripts (with China control filter) A lot more of language than you might think is nearly auto-generated already and has been for a century. Vox pioneering the explainer-journalism kinda feels like a continuation of that kind of thing.
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The image of writers is as solo creators but most in the last century have been part of mechanical turk type content generation processes. The only difference is how strong the formulaic algorithmic scaffolding is.
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Language lost above, reproduction lost below. Out if the gene pool, out of the [verbal] meme pool, so what’s left?
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Asymptotic condition: homo sapiens forks into 2 symbiote pseudospecies, non-breeders reproduce memetically, breeders breed at replacement rate for both, non-breeders contribute to biological inclusive fitness by doing info-work embedded in the big stack that sustains the breeders twitter.com/robkhenderson/…
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This is exactly right. Language is an acoustic encoding for hunter gatherers to co-exist in physical space. Print culture was a fork to smear culture across the finite lifespan of individuals. Math notation was a way to externalize structured compression of phenomena beyond brain
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But all language is either extending the human phenotype, or aiding in our compression of raw sensory input to the minimum level needed to feed into an action loop. Learning Machines don’t have the same compression reqs as us. Explainable AI ultimately is placebo for agency.
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