That last paragraph is interesting—my conclusions were built around the unconscious assumptions that a natural language program would be developed by a commercial business, and that it would rapidly start using it in some obvious way. I didn’t have an assumption about whether a company would publicize having a natural language program.
Now that I look at what I was thinking (or what I was not thinking), there’s no obvious reason to think natural language programs wouldn’t first be developed by a government. I think the most obvious use would be surveillance.
My best argument against that already having happened is that we aren’t seeing a sharp rise in arrests. Of course, as in WWII, it may be that a government can’t act on all its secretly obtained knowledge because the ability to get that knowledge covertly is a more important secret than anything which could be gained by acting on some of it.
By analogy with the chess programs, ordinary human-level use of language should lead (but how quickly?) to more skillful than human use, and I’m not seeing that. On yet another hand, would I recognize it, if it were trying to conceal itself?
ETA: I was assuming that, if natural language were developed by a government, it would be America. If it were developed by Japan (the most plausible candidate that surfaced after a moment’s thought), I’d have even less chance of noticing.
I have some knowledge of linguistics, and as far as I know, reverse-engineering the grammatical rules used by the language processing parts of the human brain is a problem of mind-boggling complexity. Large numbers of very smart linguists have devoted their careers to modelling these rules, and yet, even if we allow for rules that rely on human common sense that nobody yet knows how to mimic using computers, and even if we limit the question to some very small subset of the grammar, all the existing models are woefully inadequate.
I find it vanishingly unlikely that a secret project could have achieved major breakthroughs in this area. Even with infinite resources, I don’t see how they could even begin to tackle the problem in a way different from what the linguists are already doing.
That last paragraph is interesting—my conclusions were built around the unconscious assumptions that a natural language program would be developed by a commercial business, and that it would rapidly start using it in some obvious way. I didn’t have an assumption about whether a company would publicize having a natural language program.
Now that I look at what I was thinking (or what I was not thinking), there’s no obvious reason to think natural language programs wouldn’t first be developed by a government. I think the most obvious use would be surveillance.
My best argument against that already having happened is that we aren’t seeing a sharp rise in arrests. Of course, as in WWII, it may be that a government can’t act on all its secretly obtained knowledge because the ability to get that knowledge covertly is a more important secret than anything which could be gained by acting on some of it.
By analogy with the chess programs, ordinary human-level use of language should lead (but how quickly?) to more skillful than human use, and I’m not seeing that. On yet another hand, would I recognize it, if it were trying to conceal itself?
ETA: I was assuming that, if natural language were developed by a government, it would be America. If it were developed by Japan (the most plausible candidate that surfaced after a moment’s thought), I’d have even less chance of noticing.
I have some knowledge of linguistics, and as far as I know, reverse-engineering the grammatical rules used by the language processing parts of the human brain is a problem of mind-boggling complexity. Large numbers of very smart linguists have devoted their careers to modelling these rules, and yet, even if we allow for rules that rely on human common sense that nobody yet knows how to mimic using computers, and even if we limit the question to some very small subset of the grammar, all the existing models are woefully inadequate.
I find it vanishingly unlikely that a secret project could have achieved major breakthroughs in this area. Even with infinite resources, I don’t see how they could even begin to tackle the problem in a way different from what the linguists are already doing.
That’s reassuring.
If I had infinite resources, I’d work on modeling the infant brain well enough to have a program which could learn language the same way a human does.
I don’t know if this would run into ethical problems around machine sentience. Probably.