Then came the word

Most things about language are still puzzling for science, but I hope to be able to outline the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) essentials for the sake of ZIA here. So, if you followed the previous post, the brain has developed an amazing multiresolution representation of the world, and could seek to externalise it, write it down perhaps as a practicality for one’s own sake. This is where the plot thickens, as the brain’s solipsist, solitary universe meets a world teeming with potential friends and foes. Luckily, or by definition, the most interesting lifeforms share a lot of your genetic make up, meaning you do not have to work on developing a language from scratch (this “from scratch” refers to the problems of one alien intelligence trying to interpret the signals of another, rather than simply making up new words and rules around concepts we have mastered, as with the creation of Esperanto and Klingon).

Again from an earlier discussion, you wouldn’t expect the brain to use flowery language, to settle for linguistic ambiguities, or use imprecise or altogether meaningless verbalisations “people are good”, “people are evil”, “what is the purpose of life”- ultimately the brain wants to work out things like “there is a banana there, and the banana-eater closer than me”. It is likely that the secondary characteristics of language serve the social animal very well, and have, perhaps accidentally, allowed the mind-language structure to abstract and generalise ad infinitum. For my purposes however, the most salient feature of language is that it MUST be a good universe representation. “There is a bad man trying to break the door” must be something of an ideal compression of a myriad of Newtonian Physics facts such as “he is holding a 5 kilo axe and swings at 5 rpm at a typical speed of 60 km/h – and he did spent 5 years in a mental institute”. It could also be that this man is a true hero trying to save somebody behind the door, which suggests we are dealing with lossy compression, which by no means detracts from the value and power of such linguistic/cognitive compression.

The corollary of the previous two paragraphs is that language suggests itself as a cognitive representation for artificial brains. When “thinking”, we may want to make use of decompressors, expanding statements to something of real-world relevance just like the mp3 player does, and we would love to have compressors that take such expanded forms and produce common, imprecise, illogical English. In fact, a “real” machine translation should work exactly like that, balooning input statements from one language and deflating them into the other. The use (and invention) of intermediate languages for machine translation is not new of course, what is new (or, anyway, newer) is the implicit, embodied intermediate layer through compressors and decompressors. This intermediate layer will have to be highly tuned and, perhaps, intelligent to deal with the vastly asymmetric mapping between the linguistic and physical spaces, not to mention that for human affairs the “physics” involves very slippery internal worlds, style, emotion etc.