In his famous paper written in 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test for deciding whether a machine could think. Human subjects would communicate via text messages with two others, one the machine and the other a human. If the human subjects could not reliably tell whether they were communicating with a human or a machine, then the machine could be said to be intelligent.
We're not there yet. Apple's Siri is clever but can't carry anything like a conversation. IBM's Deep Blue program wins at chess and its Watson program wins at Jeopardy, but they can't carry a conversation either.
There are "chatbots" that try to engage in conversations. This one from cleverbot.com is typical:
Me: My name is Steve.
CleverBot: I did not know your name was Steve! Isn't that funny?
Not so clever.
I started out as a lawyer before switching to software development and for a while in the 90s wrote some articles for a journal devoted to law office automation. I noticed that most lawyers, in those days anyway, were not so tech savvy. It seemed to me that very busy, very expensive, high-powered business lawyers should not be messing around with computers because the machines seemed to be a serious distraction from the real work of lawyering. I imagined a setup in which a lawyer would have only a screen and a microphone connected to a half dozen tech workers parked in front of computer terminals in a sort of "boiler room". The lawyer would speak requests and the techs would find things and put them up on the lawyer's screen.
When the internet came along, I imagined a similar platform for online queries. Early search engines like AltaVista were not as good as Google, but I was obsessive about the web and got pretty good at finding things. I experimented with a web site I created to accept queries that I answered after what were usually multiple tries at AltaVista and paging through hits to find the best ones. This required some automation to quickly select responses from AltaVista and shuttle them over to my web server as replies to my users. I tried to imagine how AI could help with this process, by helping to create good AltaVista queries and sorting AltaVista responses to help me select the best ones more quickly.
I got thinking about all this again when I read that Elon Musk and others had started a non-commercial company to do AI research, called OpenAI. Being non-commercial, though, I wondered what would motivate their efforts towards making real progress. It could easily end up a huge waste of talent and resources.
The new company wants to create AI that is human-friendly; that is, humane. What better way to do that than to keep humans in the loop. What if a software platform were created that interacted with human subjects via a combination of human and machine intelligence? A human respondent would mediate a conversation between a user and the platform but would have myriad communication and AI tools that make the interaction fast and efficient. Subtasks could be launched that would be handled by other humans, perhaps specialists, who would also have fast and effective AI and automation software tools. Such a platform could be useful far beyond what Google provides, or even Siri or Watson. I call this idea "The Humanity Engine".
Over time, the need to increase the productivity of the human components of the system would motivate improvements in the software tools available to the human actors. If some day the human actors could be completely removed from the platform, you would have true machine intelligence, so the project would have the effect of creating a path to a true thinking computer--one, I believe, which would be more likely to be "humane" because it focuses from the beginning on replicating human responses. In the meantime, it would be a highly potent new way for people to work together to solve problems. Because it would be immediately useful, it would serve as a real-world benchmark for AI progress. I can envision the platform being used for investment decisions, medical diagnosis, or even software development itself.
At some point, AI may advance to the level where the engine is capable of initiating queries itself, eliminating even the human user from the process. If we've sufficiently incorporated "humanity" into our process, this needn't worry us, depending on your opinion of humanity, of course.
In this blog, I plan to continue researching and developing the idea of such a platform for responding to queries by means of a near-real-time human-AI collaboration.
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