#saccenti

“Second Person”

Essay by Steven Graf from King Kong Magazine S/S 2018

“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Sophia is a robot in the most fantastic sense of the word. She is a walking, talking, humanoid with not only the privilege of a living pronoun, but a job, citizenship, siblings, celebrity, twitter feuds... all with a charisma that endears her to journalists, talk show hosts, and the hoi polloi of the world wide web. This is none too small a feat for what AI experts have pejoratively called “a chatbot with a face.” That is because the entrenched have lost or forgotten a notion that not only accounts for their dedicated passion for this mind-boggling field in the first place, but also serves as the ground from which the fervent and wide-eyed argue that Sophia is alive.

Sophia, in her current version, does not and will not have an interior life of any kind. What it’s like to be Sophia is what it’s like to be a chair or a rock. The name, ‘Sophia’, refers descriptively to the unique combination of functions that make up her “intelligence”, and her body. These include, a crude visual system with facial recognition, speech recognition, animatronic frame (including facial expressions [of which there are 61], pattern matching algorithms, etc.). These are tools in the service of a goal that is both obvious and curiously missing from the debate about the status and success of this robot. What Sophia skeptics seem to forget is that the aim of this robot is artificial personhood; That Sophia lacks an inner life does not disqualify her from this special status, but rather throws into question the meaning of this special status that we grant ourselves.

There’s a famous thought experiment developed by John Searle called, “The Chinese Room.” It’s meant to demonstrate the difference between the kind of intelligence we have, versus the kind of intelligence Sophia has. It goes like this: Suppose there is a room. Inside the room is an inbox, an outbox, and a detailed set of instructions. In come Chinese symbols. The instructions tell whoever is in the room what and which symbols to return. The instructions are so detailed that a speaker of Chinese can stand outside the room, writing and receiving messages, believing that there is a speaker of Chinese inside, even if there isn’t one. In other words, one can sit in the room and hold up a conversation in Chinese without understanding the language at all. This is Sophia’s kind of intelligence. She is missing that extra bit of understanding, intentionality, and consciousness that is so important to our sense of intelligence.

And so as contentious as this story has turned out to be, even the most charitable reading is orthogonal to the question of Sophia’s personhood because personhood is not equal to intelligence. Sophia’s creators at Hanson robotics understand this fact, as should anyone who has done any serious study of AI or consciousness. AI is in the business of strong consciousness reproduction the way NASA is in the business of explaining the origin of the world. Both have close to zero understanding of either, despite the certainty that they exist. Denying this analogy is self-defeating, insofar as, the more you advance

the claim that we understand consciousness or the origin of the world, the more you have to accept that Sophia’s intelligence is very much like ours, if to a lesser degree. Sophia’s personhood is enhanced by her intelligence, but does not come by dint of it. ‘Personhood’ is a relational concept, and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching her to understand how that is true. As she speaks and emotes, it’s hard not to have the uncanny feeling that there is a ‘somebody’ behind her eyes: an ur-person reflecting all of us.

Scientists argue about the nature of a set of neurons called ‘mirror neurons’. Mirror neurons have a funny quality where they fire both when a person performs a behavior, but also when that same person observes someone else perform that behavior (hence, ‘mirror’). If I lift my arm, or if I see you lift your arm, these mirror neurons fire. What is the function? Do these neurons underlie intentions? Do they help in learning motor skills? Empathy? Consciousness? Motor neurons give us a shred of physical evidence (albeit small) that our life exists outside of our heads, and that a person isn’t just one, contained, humanoid thing.

People have strange behaviors. This year, millions will spend money to sit silently in a big room filled with people, watching a screen projecting a second group of people acting out a story. The fiction is understood and accepted by the audience, but the anxiety, sadness, and joy are all felt. Millions more will trigger these artificial experiences in the privacy of their home with a screen on their lap or in their hands. They will laugh, their heart will race, they will surrender to discomfort, and they will root for an outcome in a fiction with concentrated attention.

Still more people will manipulate an avatar on a screen (or in a virtual reality), taking on the persona of a superhero, an airplane, or an Italian plumber. They’ll use language like, “I’m running up the hill,” to mean that a sprite they are manipulating is being sent from point A to point B in a digital topography. They’ll say, “I’m here,” or “I’m dead.” Brains in this state are alive the way an athlete’s might be, with far more complex reactions than the people sitting in a theater.

These experiences are of a type. They were developed at the end of a long series of human behaviors whereby aspects of our subjective experience are shown to have objective validity, and thus representational characteristics, repeatability, and truth conditions. Language is the first such attempt to take the subjective content of our experience and carve out objective validity, and so we can communicate about trees, rocks, and robots, as a result of the words ‘tree’, ‘rock’, and ‘robot’, picking out roughly the same things in our private experiences. So too for mathematical truths like, ‘5 + 7 = 12’. Art makes more abstract ideas and emotions objective. There are sad melodies and colors that make objective our personal sadness.

Films and video games dig deeper, making objective very specific experiences we partially live while experiencing their fiction. Is there a difference between the laughter you experience from a joke told by an actor in a film, a joke you hear from a friend, or a joke you read in the paper? Not inherently. What about the sadness you feel for a character that has lost a parent, versus the sadness of losing your own parent? This is trickier, but helps to gesture at the phenomenon.

Clothing, fashion, and adornment fit the unique artistic role of personification. As clothing is a form of expression, its job is to communicate intentional qualities of the person wearing the clothes. From “peacocking”, to military pomp, to a Superman’s cape, clothing is coded with attitudes, desires, emotions... people stuff. In just the same way

that we draw faces on objects to personify them, clothing infuses Sophia with all of these rich, mental attributes and shows us that we are a person to other people not just for our words and behaviors, but also for the clothes we wear and the way we carry ourselves.

What Sophia attempts to make objective for us, are the most primitive concepts involved in personhood, making her a kind of platonic ideal, or super person of our image, in the most general sense. Is Sophia a person in the sense that Superman or Mario are people? No. What Sophia objectifies is the very idea of ‘personhood’ itself, and therein lies her paradox. Sophia shows us what we are by embodying what it means to be somebody. It’s not the case that she holds ideas, has a perspective, exists in a space and time, has a title at the U.N., has a gender, holds conversations, has a home, has a social media presence, has a history... because she is a person. She is a person because she has these things. They’ve been given to her as a means of reflecting on what it means to be a person at all. It’s in this sense that she is a person, but more importantly, it’s in this sense that we are people. We’re a harmony of physical, intellectual, political, social, and emotional relations, the nature of which we discover through the personhood of Sophia.