It seems as though everywhere
we look, and in just about everything we read humans use metaphors to describe
things. It happens when you are talking to your friends, and it happens when
you are reading nonfiction or fiction, we see it on billboards, in advertising,
in the newspaper, and we hear descriptions using metaphors in the TV news. Even
teachers use it when educating our children, metaphors are truly everywhere. In
fact, I would challenge you to go one day of your life without using a
metaphor. I bet you it would be harder than you think.
There was an interesting
article recently in Network World's Online News and Blogging Network by Michael
Cooley on his Layer 8 Blog titled "Apple of My Eye? U.S. Fancies a Huge
Metaphor Repository - The US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency
(IARPA) Building a System to Understand Human Metaphorical Speech".
"IARPA wants a repository
of American/English & for Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish & Russian. It
has been known since Aristotle that rhetorical devices are unique, creative
instances of language artistry. They shape how people think about complex
topics & influence beliefs; reduce complexity by expressing patterns; &
show uncovered inferred meanings and worldviews of particular groups or
individuals."
As a writer, this concerns me
very much, because as soon as artificial intelligent computers can understand
human language, and the difference between a metaphor, a story, versus actual
nonfiction, then it will also be able to create stories, create new metaphors,
and therefore someone like me who likes to write creative fiction as a hobby,
or even science fiction, well, I simply won't be needed anymore.
I will be replaced by a
computer.
Now then, you might say that it
is impossible, that it will never happen, but I guarantee you it will, and that
day is coming. Robotics, computers, artificial intelligence, will eventually
replace almost nearly every human job, even the creative ones. Now then, some
people believe that artificial intelligence will never reach the level of human
creativity. This is because it is very hard to get a computer to become
creative, or at least that's what they say. Personally, I considered several
ways to get AI software to simulate human creativity.
After all, there is that
philosophical thought that there are no original thoughts, that humans simply
take one thing and re-assimilate the information borrowing observations and
experiences from one area of the human endeavor and combining it with others
creating a third. Then they call it creative, but is that real creativity, or
is that just a recombination. Because if it is a recombination and that's all
that human creativity really is, then surely we can design AI software to do
that. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
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