Is your book on Google somewhere?

​Is your book on Google somewhere? If it is, and Google books has a copy in its data-banks, then there is a strong chance that it has been part of the educational program for the infant artificial intelligence being gestated in the lofty labs at Silicon Valley.


The human condition is somewhat obscure, and there is no program that can write a human being, however with enough information about the way enough people think, the digital brain has a good chance at making educated guesses. This is what AI really is, as in a system of learning, guessing, discovering truth, adapting guess process through new learning. Of course it is a lot more clever than that, but in reality this is how anything, anyone learns. Perhaps what we cannot teach the machine is how to feel. Of course we need the correct biology and conscious awareness to be able to do so. A brain on its own isn't really a human.


So Romance novels have been included into the mind of this binary creature, perhaps in a hope that with an understanding of how people fall in and out of love, the fake brain can decide for itself how best to be kind, genuine, and empatically responsible. I am a little concerned about the repercussions of such activity, and how this entity will affect people. Computers lack imagination, they can't guess based on something abstract. In order for the 1 to become 1 when it was previously 0, there must be a true reading somewhere. Imagination requires the element of unsure, the pinch of salt, the leap of faith. Do you think a computer could ever get to this point? Is our imagination simply a product of everything we have learned, just like the AI system, or does it contain an element of us that is independent? At the very least we will feel the thoughts as they are conceived and this will be a uniquely human experience.


Teaching an AI mind about right and wrong might be tough, as we know there are many paradoxes when concerning absolutes in life. Some things that we know to be absolutely wrong, like paedophilia in human beings, are practiced quite openly in other species. Some things which we culturally find absolutely wrong are also practiced by other people in other cultures. If the brain is given a world wide starting point for its education, who knows what kind of mindset it will end up having?


To keep it busy, there will be a lot of fictional nonsense that inevitably ends up in books about people, and the learned behaviours and responses will not work in reality as well as expected. Nothing can truly mirror real life, and even one thousand books written by one thousand different people couldn't make a good picture. We must be alive in the world for a significant amount of time as an independently thinking individual before we can begin to call ourselves intelligent.


If Google thinks that reading books makes us intelligent, then in human terms, they'd be right. We learn a lot about life by discovering what other people think about it. Once we knit together all those points of view, we end up with a kind of mental star, in which our point of view hits bang in the middle. Reading helps us grow as people, and the more rich the text, the better.


And perhaps you fancy being the next primary school teacher to the AI at Google Labs, see if you can confuse it for a while eh? Get writing.