Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [133]
Q: What does the box contain?
A: The blue pyramid and the blue box.
Q: How many blocks are not in the box?
A: Four of them.
Q: Is at least one of them narrower than the one which I told you to pick up?
A: Yes, the red cube.
Q: Is there a steeple?
A: Sorry, I don’t know the word “steeple.”
Q: A steeple is a stack which contains two green cubes and a pyramid, for example.
A: I understand.
Q: Are there any steeples now?
A: No.
Q: Build one.
The machine does. It reaches out its mechanical hand, moves the cubes and builds the structure that has just been described.
Q: When did you pick up the pyramid?
A: While I was stacking up the red cube, the large red block and the large green cube.
Q: Why?
A: To get rid of it.
Q: Why did you clear off that cube?
A: To put it on the large green cube.
As another example, a machine psychiatrist has been developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, also at MIT. This is a much simpler program than Winograd’s, since it involves nondirective psychotherapy, which, generally speaking, requires extremely simple-minded computer programs. Here is a striking dialogue between a human being and a computer psychotherapist (There is certainly a selection effect here. Many other such machine/human psychiatric dialogues are not nearly so striking. But I suppose most human/human psychiatric dialogues are not very striking either.) In this interaction, in order to spell out clearly the respective roles of therapist and patient, the computer therapist types upper case while the patient types lower case:
men are all alike
IN WHAT WAY
they’re always bugging us about something or other
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
well, my boy friend made me come here
YOUR BOY FRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
he noticed that i’m depressed much of the time
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
he’s right. I am unhappy
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
i need some help, that much is clear
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
perhaps i could learn to get along with my mother
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
my mother takes care of me
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
my father
YOUR FATHER
you are like my father in some ways
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
you are not very aggressive, but i don’t think you want me to notice that
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
you don’t argue with me
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
you are afraid of me
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
it pleases my father to think i am afraid of him
WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
bullies
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOY FRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
This astonishing—one is very tempted to say “perceptive”—response from the computer is, of course, preprogrammed. But, then, so are the responses of human psychotherapists. In a time when more and more people in our society seem to be in need of psychiatric counseling, and when time-sharing of computers is widespread, I can even imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we are able to talk to an attentive, tested and largely nondirective psychotherapist. Ensuring the confidentiality of the psychiatric dialogue is one of several important steps still to be worked out.
ANOTHER SIGN of the intellectual accomplishments of machines is in games. Even exceptionally simple computers—those that can be wired by a bright ten-year-old—can be programmed to play perfect tic-tac-toe. Some computers can play world-class checkers. Chess is of course a much more complicated game than tic-tac-toe or checkers. Here programming a machine to win is more difficult, and novel strategies have been used, including several rather successful attempts to have a computer learn from its own experience in playing previous chess games.