Just thinking about it this morning, I noticed a pattern: In early Azimov stories about robots, the robots who could not speak were less advanced than the later versions who could speak. But the mute robots were capable of complex tasks, such as Robbie, a childcare robot. "He just can’t help being faithful and loving and kind. He’s a machine— made so, " (but he couldn’t talk). In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , Mike (HOLMES IV) is a sentient, room-sized computer, but his conversations with the computer technician are said to be translated from Loglan, a constructed language without the ambiguities of English. Data in Star Trek: TNG is sentient, but he “cannot use contractions,” as though randomly replacing a few “cannots” with a “can’t” is so difficult. The daughter that Data invents surpasses him, first in using contractions, and later in having emotions. Not sci-fi, but in 1985, Rick Briggs at NASA proposed using Sanskrit, rather than English, as a target language for artificial intelligence ( https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v6i1.466 ) because Sanskrit’s grammatical structure is much more regular and unambiguous. Whereas rules for English grammar has exceptions, Sanskrit was codified by Pāṇini in the 5th‒4th century BCE with 3959 exact, exception-free rules. The 13th century CE Navya-Nyāya Sanskrit was further formalized for use in rigorous logic, but not everyday speech. This strikes me as very similar to the idea of only talking to a computer in Loglan. Of course, there’s Turing’s Imitation Game , which takes conversational speech to be a definition of intelligence (or at least avoids definitions and just proposes it as a testable outcome). Counter-points: HAL in 2001 was sentient and a fluent communicator in English, but when he was taken apart (“my mind is going… I can feel it…”) all that was left was his ability to sing the “Daisy, Daisy” song, which was a real speaking-computer demonstration that Arthur C. Clark had witnessed. The computer in Star Trek was routinely instructed in English, especially in the early original and 90’s series, but there was never any suspicion that it was sentient unless that was a plot point (e.g. The Ultimate Computer (TOS) or Emergence (TNG)). In fact, interactions with Majel Barrett’s offscreen voice were very close to modern uses of ChatGPT or coding assistants. It’s not an exact pattern, but it seems like the difficulty of creating AI with natural language was overestimated relative to the difficulty of creating AI with mental abilities. submitted by /u/AddlepatedSolivagant
Originally posted by u/AddlepatedSolivagant on r/ArtificialInteligence