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The Shallowness of Douglas Hofstadter. > I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and re

by Jyaif 9y ago

The Shallowness of Douglas Hofstadter. > I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on one’s many years of experience in life, and on one’s creative imagination. If, some “fine” day, human translators were to become relics of the past, my respect for the human mind would be profoundly shaken, and the shock would leave me reeling with terrible confusion and immense, permanent sadness. If (or more likely, "When") computers translate better than human, respect for the human mind should increase. It's quite a tough problem to solve, way harder than manual translation which thousands of people have been doing for centuries.

koverstreet 9y ago
You could've engaged with the substance of the article, instead of just calling Doug Hofstadter shallow and saying "no, you're wrong!".
jamesmcintyre 9y ago
I believe Hofstadter is more worried about people prematurely adopting this technology en masse simply because, by it's inherently impressive nature and mysterious inner-workings, it generates its own terrific PR which clouds the perception of its actual efficacy at a deeply cognitive task. Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants speaks to the same willingness for human societies to so eagerly jump into new, unproven or potentially dangerous technologies without ever stopping to consider the effects of the adoption and log-term usage on their societies. A whole chapter is about how the Amish culture is not necessarily anti-technology so much as they are slow, disciplined adopters of technology. They hold their people's culture above all other values including productivity or connectivity and so to them it's a clear decision to at first be skeptical of new technologies and to deliberate the adoption of these technologies until the elders of the community can come to a consensus. Even then they usually allow small "pilots" or testing of the technology with a select few individuals at first. Kelly doesn't suggest we adopt the Amish culture, simply that there is something to be learned here. I think A.I would need to become a fully robust form of consciousness capable of generating its own novel ideas spontaneously and to form a sort of gestalt from a mix of information, logic, patterns but also "feelings" (or whatever term would be used for "feelings" in a conscious AI) in order to produce the same type of translation a human can. Granted, even without consciousness it will likely come extremely close over time with more training and improvements to the algorithms but as Hofstadter explains it takes more than a sort of algorithmic proficiency: "..To me, the word “translation” exudes a mysterious and evocative aura. It denotes a profoundly human art form that graciously carries clear ideas in Language A into clear ideas in Language B, and the bridging act not only should maintain clarity, but also should give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author. Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind. It’s not that the words of the original are sloshing back and forth; it’s the ideas that are triggering all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios in my mind. Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. Only when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind do I start to try to express it—to “press it out”—in the second language. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question." I predict we will prematurely adopt machine-learning powered translation at the cost of loosing depth, clarity and the richness of the human expression of ideas but for the majority of us the impact may be minimal especially if great human literatures are still translated by humans.
- koverstreet 9y ago
  I think it's just as much that Hofstadter doesn't want people making overstated claims giving a bad name for AI research (again!) when people finally realize how limited the current approaches are.
  - jamesmcintyre 9y ago
    I agree it's probably just as much a warning to prevent overstated claims in general as it's harmful for numerous reasons.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dTal 9y ago
Translation is an "AI-complete" problem, if I may coin a phrase. Because language expresses human ideas, and languages do not map 1-1, proper translation can sometimes require a complete understanding of the source material (in order to properly circumlocute in the target language). This is not "quite a tough problem to solve"; it is on par with the Turing test. Hofstadter is not complaining about how awful it would be if computers could pass the Turing test - I'm sure he would be quite as impressed as you - he is saying that given that Strong AI is pure fantasy at the moment, it would be a tragedy and an insult to language to abandon human translation in favour of a half-assed mechanical version.

by Jyaif 9y ago

koverstreet 9y ago

You could've engaged with the substance of the article, instead of just calling Doug Hofstadter shallow and saying "no, you're wrong!".

jamesmcintyre 9y ago

I believe Hofstadter is more worried about people prematurely adopting this technology en masse simply because, by it's inherently impressive nature and mysterious inner-workings, it generates its own terrific PR which clouds the perception of its actual efficacy at a deeply cognitive task. Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants speaks to the same willingness for human societies to so eagerly jump into new, unproven or potentially dangerous technologies without ever stopping to consider the effects of the adoption and log-term usage on their societies. A whole chapter is about how the Amish culture is not necessarily anti-technology so much as they are slow, disciplined adopters of technology. They hold their people's culture above all other values including productivity or connectivity and so to them it's a clear decision to at first be skeptical of new technologies and to deliberate the adoption of these technologies until the elders of the community can come to a consensus. Even then they usually allow small "pilots" or testing of the technology with a select few individuals at first. Kelly doesn't suggest we adopt the Amish culture, simply that there is something to be learned here. I think A.I would need to become a fully robust form of consciousness capable of generating its own novel ideas spontaneously and to form a sort of gestalt from a mix of information, logic, patterns but also "feelings" (or whatever term would be used for "feelings" in a conscious AI) in order to produce the same type of translation a human can. Granted, even without consciousness it will likely come extremely close over time with more training and improvements to the algorithms but as Hofstadter explains it takes more than a sort of algorithmic proficiency: "..To me, the word “translation” exudes a mysterious and evocative aura. It denotes a profoundly human art form that graciously carries clear ideas in Language A into clear ideas in Language B, and the bridging act not only should maintain clarity, but also should give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author. Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind. It’s not that the words of the original are sloshing back and forth; it’s the ideas that are triggering all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios in my mind. Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. Only when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind do I start to try to express it—to “press it out”—in the second language. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question." I predict we will prematurely adopt machine-learning powered translation at the cost of loosing depth, clarity and the richness of the human expression of ideas but for the majority of us the impact may be minimal especially if great human literatures are still translated by humans.

koverstreet 9y ago
I think it's just as much that Hofstadter doesn't want people making overstated claims giving a bad name for AI research (again!) when people finally realize how limited the current approaches are.
- jamesmcintyre 9y ago
  I agree it's probably just as much a warning to prevent overstated claims in general as it's harmful for numerous reasons.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dTal 9y ago

Translation is an "AI-complete" problem, if I may coin a phrase. Because language expresses human ideas, and languages do not map 1-1, proper translation can sometimes require a complete understanding of the source material (in order to properly circumlocute in the target language). This is not "quite a tough problem to solve"; it is on par with the Turing test. Hofstadter is not complaining about how awful it would be if computers could pass the Turing test - I'm sure he would be quite as impressed as you - he is saying that given that Strong AI is pure fantasy at the moment, it would be a tragedy and an insult to language to abandon human translation in favour of a half-assed mechanical version.