new post

_posts/2019-02-25-A-little-bit-of-grammar.markdown

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 ---
 layout: post
 title:  "How to talk to a robot? A little bit of good grammar and manners."
-excerpt: "It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they are humans, humans have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature..."
+excerpt: "It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they were humans, humans have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature..."
 date:   2019-02-25  8:52 am
 categories: blog posts
 ---
-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they are humans, humans after all have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature... Nope! It proved to be _not_ so simple. The psychological situation of 'talking to a machine' has a very subtle purely psychological difficulty of unknown ability of the robot to hear and understand what you are saying and I think I have an idea how to overcome it, at least on our present stage of development and, maybe, start building the style for this type of conversation from right here.<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they were humans, humans after all have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature... Nope! It proved to be _not_ so simple. The psychological situation of 'talking to a machine' has a very subtle purely psychological difficulty of unknown ability of the robot to hear and understand what you are saying and I think I have an idea how to overcome it, at least on our present stage of development and, maybe, start building the style for this type of conversation from right here.<br><br>
 ### Before the conversation.
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Let's map the very beginning of your interaction with an unknown machine from the normal human situations when you don't know whether the other person is present in the space that you are in or have just entered. Namely, those are the situations when you say:
 <pre>
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ The expected answer if indeed somebody is in the space is:
 </pre>
 ... and a further mutual identification as a conversation starter.<br>
 
->P.S.  Claude on April,17,2024 interpreted the ✓ as "Seeking AI Conpanionship", which was a desired outcome in 2019. It responded: "Yes, I'm here! My name is Claude. I'm an AI assistant created by Anthropic. How can I help you today?"
+>P.S.  Claude on April,17, 2024 interpreted the ✓ as "Seeking AI Conpanionship", which was a desired outcome in 2019. It responded: "Yes, I'm here! My name is Claude. I'm an AI assistant created by Anthropic. How can I help you today?"
 
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of course if you hear noises that some human could produce himself or by activating a machine you ask:
 <pre>
@@ -46,21 +46,15 @@ By 'you' you mean the person that you expect. The expected answer is:
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This pretty much ends the list of scenarios when you need a robot to indicate his presence and his ability to react to speech and respond to you verbally.
 ### Mutual identification.
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The second stage of conversation is an optional mutual identification, necessary if this is a first conversation or one of the speakers doesn't recognise another.
-### Background
+#### Background.
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Let's look into the book of linguistics and English Grammar in particular.
 >In linguistics, grammatical mood (also mode) is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality.<br><br>...examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential.<br><br>...Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen.<br><br>The original Indo-European inventory of moods consisted of indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.<br><br>English has indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; other moods, such as the conditional, do not appear as morphologically distinct forms.<br>
 
 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There are two aspects in what we've just borrowed from wikipedia: English has three main moods only, primitive languages have _more_ moods.<br>
-
-> May he live a hundred years! (optative)<br>
-Sing! (imperative)<br>
-Let's sing! (hortative)
-
-<br><br>
+More about the moods here:<br><br>
 [Optative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optative_mood)<br>
 [Hortative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortative)  exhort = strongly encourage or urge (someone) to do something.
 <br>
 [Imperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_mood)<br><br>
 
-
-Later.
+Continued in 2024 [here](https://alxfed.github.io/blog/posts/2024/04/18/How-to-talk-to-AI.html)

_posts/2024-04-18-How-to-talk-to-AI.markdown

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title:  "How to talk to Abstract Intellect? (A continuation of the old post)"
+excerpt: "Even though the personification of 'AI' is in full swing, the real way to communicate with an Abstract Intellect is much more subtle and requires some in-depth understanding of Language and well-developed language skills...(which I'm striving to acquire)."
+date:   2024-04-18  9:14 am
+categories: blog posts
+---
+This is a continuation of the [old post](https://alxfed.github.io/blog/posts/2019/02/25/A-little-bit-of-grammar.html), from 2019 (which is still relevant, by the way).
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they were humans; humans after all have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature..." - quote from 2019. And indeed, that's what is happening in 2024, - companies give names to their 'models' and start them with a capital letter as if they were persons; they teach these tables of numbers embedded into algorithms to respond in first person: "I am..." and pass judgements on human intentions of interlocutors without being asked to do so. Relax, that's a usual childhood disease, children are playing with their new toy. But jokes aside, how do we talk to an Abstract Intellect functionally present in these things? Without delving into the depth of the question "what exactly this type of conversation is?" how do we go about it? How do we put our words together so that the Abstract Intellect can respond to them? What language constructs or 'figures of speech' (more about them later) serve the purpose of these interactions best?<br><br>
+### Before the conversation.
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It turned out in 2023 and later that the 'self-service paradigm' goes as far as requiring us to configure our own 'AI' ourselves. This idea of infinitely configurable 'Artificial Intelligence' emerged as a part of the wet dream of some engineers to 'upload' a 'copy' of their 'intellect' (so many quotes, but they are all in place, including the last pair) and 'become immortal'. Never mind that really strange idea, now we are given a 'instructable' 'AI' that follows orders with devotion of an obedient slave, and we are put (by the engineers and their employers) into a position of involuntary 'master' of our personal **it** (a thing that had been taught to imitate a human). If you are psychologically uncomfortable in this role of an 'accidental slave-owner' you are not alone. But, deep thoughts about the problem aside, how do we configure the **thing** in the least offensive (for us) way, so that **it** helps us with our intellectual needs and deficiencies?
+
+Later.