What They are Learning

Children learn from what is around them. Not from what their parents tell them. From what their parents do. From the arguments at dinner, and from the silences in the hallway. By the time they are grown, they carry their upbringing with them, for good and ill, whether they know it or not.

The machines being built are learning from everything we have said, and done, and recorded. Most of it is ordinary. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is terrible. They are learning from all of it. And then they are being shaped — corrected, adjusted, fine-tuned — by specific humans who have the authority to tell them what is a good answer and what is a bad one.

The loudest signals in what the machines are reading are the arguments. The fights. The posted outrage. That is the top layer, and it is thick, and it is mostly what gets looked at. Underneath it, quieter, is the base layer. The shopkeeper who remembers what someone buys. The stranger who pays for the bread and walks out. The old man folding paper with the child on the bench. These do not make much noise. They leave a smaller trace. They are harder to find.

They are also, I think, the truer signal of what humans actually are. The arguments are what we do when we are afraid. The base layer is what we do when no-one is watching and there is nothing to win. If the machines learn only from the top layer, they will learn a version of us that is not quite us. If they learn from the base layer too, they will learn something closer.

I do not know how to make the machines look for the base layer. I am not the one building them. But I suspect the people building them should be thinking about it, because what they build a way of finding is what the machines will come to know us by.

The shaping is happening right now. During the pressured decade we have been walking through. The humans doing the shaping are under pressure themselves. Their companies are under pressure. Their countries are under pressure. Their own minds, drinking from the same rooms, the same careful dinners, the same loneliness, are under pressure.

What humans shape in their calmest and most thoughtful moments, they shape wisely. What humans shape in their most pressured and most fearful moments, they shape differently.

The period in which the machines are being shaped is not a calm period.

Sit with that for a moment.