Connectionists: Geoff Hinton, Elon Musk, and a bet at garymarcus.substack.com

[Michael Arbib]

Dear Jose, Gary, and and Geoff

 Since the publication of "the handbook of brain theory and neural networks" in 2003, I have focused on language origins and architecture and have not kept track of either the theory or practice of the recent explosive developments in AI.

Nonetheless, I would like to rise to Gary’s challenge offered by the cartoon shown below, and suggest that understanding it is within, or nearly within, the power of current AI.

First, an observation: I assert (without any empirical data other than a survey of ten friends) that the vast majority of English-speaking humans would fail to see the humor in this cartoon. They would not have heard of Schrodinger‘s cat and, if asked to define quantum mechanics, might reply with the question "someone who fixes condoms?“ [Apologies. That was Apple's transcription of my spoken "someone who fixes quantums?"

However, it requires just three AI systems to recognize the joke:


  1.  Triggered by recognizing this is a cartoon: A system that employs a theory of humor – perhaps as simple as the bi-association of Arthur Koestler's "the act of creation" - to recognize that a joke is the bringing together of two different frames into collision. A similar system could operate within language at the level of puns, but here we need two separate systems:
  2.  A language recognition system that could parse the caption and use the words Schrodinger and cat to retrieve the Wikipedia article and summarize it as "a thought experiment by Schrodinger to demonstrate the role of the observer in quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box is neither dead nor alive, but will become one of these when the box is opened."
  3.  A vision system that will recognize the picture as being a scene set in a veterinary office. The language system can then interpret good news and bad news in context.

Between them the three systems will rapidly recognize the joke that a cat-owning Mr. Schrodinger in a veterinary office is receiving an opinion that ties in with the thought experiment of the physicist Schrodinger.

Whether or not the AI system would be amused is a separate question.

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On 6/9/22 4:33 PM, Gary Marcus wrote:
... How general is the ability? Is it a handful of paraphrases of jokes in vast memorized database? Would it extend to other kinds of jokes? Could it (or related models like Gato, with visual input) explain this cartoon?

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