Re:The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
by cwyers on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @05:57PM
(#14905766)
So, I don't disagree with that. What I disagree with is the characterization of the machine as doing any of that. "[H]ad simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction" anthropomorphizes the hell out of the machine, and confuses the issue. The machines don't understand English or any other human language and weren't modifying it to any sort of purpose. The machines were given a training corpus and made to communicate between agents and something fell out, and the exact manner of it was about as intentional as an apple falling out of a tree intends to hit this branch or that branch on the way down.
After all most machines currently communicate by exchanging sequences of exactly two symbols, 0 and 1, not some complex phonology. Maybe when bandwidth is not as constrained as human speech it's actually more efficient to reduce the vocabulary and increase the symbol rate.
IIRC there's something similar going on with real human languages too. For instance Chinese usually takes fewer phonemes than Spanish to express the same information. However Spanish speakers tend to speak significantly faster than the Chinese to "make up" for it. The fact that Spanish uses more sound to carry the same amount of informations makes it more resilient to "data loss" and allows a faster speech rate.