One of the things that is exciting about these
developments but also probably a bit troubling
to people is what happens when you consider
that machines can now write poetry, they can
produce haiku, machines are writing novels,
they’re producing music. So is it sensible
that within the next few years, maybe a literature
course would include not just materials, say
novels, written by humans but also by machines?
Because we’ve always thought about literature
as something that humans produce that’s
why we call it part of the humanities.
Do we have to change that? Do we have to include
machines in this? If you think about the fact
there’s a company IBM, they have their watts
and cognitive computing system and IBM is
emphatic about not saying artificial intelligence.
They say cognitive computing system saying
that the machines are actually thinking.
For all of science, we’ve had two ways of
making discoveries. You either run an experiment
or you do a survey of people. We now have
all the instrumentation we need to passively
collect all the information about every person
all day long. The senses on your skin, their
mobile phones, your emails, and we can gather
all of that information and embedded in that
information is great new insights about your
individual behavior and the behavior of the
masses. With it, we’re likely to be able
to create new laws of human behavior.
So this question of being human has centered
for so long on our ability to think and reason
if we think about 17th century figure René
Descartes who’s famous for his “Cogito
ergo sum, ”that “I think therefore I am.”
That he found the essence of human existence
really to be in that capacity to produce reason
to think but now we have thinking machines
then suddenly we have to understand in a very
complicated and deeper way just what it means
to be human.
Look so the biggest thing about computation
social science is it’s really the engine
that’s driving our future discoveries and
those discoveries will be put into machines.
Once they’re put into machines, the biggest
collaborator for everyone in the future is
unlikely to be a friend or a family member
or anybody in their network. It’s going
to be a machine.
