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Thesis Roberto Musa Facultad de Ciencias Sociales Escuela de Psicología MYTHS, TESTS AND GAMES: CULTURAL ROOTS AND CURRENT ROUTES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE By Roberto Musa Giuliano Thesis submitted to the Office of Research and Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Psychology. Advisor: Carlos Cornejo Alarcón Thesis Committee: Francisco Ceric Garrido Ricardo Rosas Díaz September, 2019 Santiago, Chile © 2019, Roberto Musa Giuliano To my parents, Tulia Giuliano Burrows and Roberto Musa Cavallé 1 Words of Thanks What pleasant news to learn that the health benefits of gratitude are legion, or so wellness gurus assure us, since the struggling writer, having at last ceased in his toil, is bound by a sacred moral duty to attempt the issuance of thanks where they are due, no matter how little faith he might place in his ability to be either fair or exhaustive. (This would certainly account for the prefatory remerciement slowly inching its way into becoming a full-fledged literary genre in its own right.) A beneficial side-effect of trying to be comprehensive in acknowledging our incurred debts, is that all those readers not mentioned therein, but who nevertheless move through things page by page and from start to finish, shall arrive at the actual flesh of the text and find it delightfully entertaining by contrast to the dilatory list of names entirely unfamiliar. For their role (which I hope they don’t end up coming to abhor) in the course of my intellectual meanderings I must mention the following formative figures: I thank Enrique Vega for instilling in me an early love of philosophical thinking, and illustrating the subtle nuances that distinguish peripatetic discussions from vagabonding. From Franco Simonetti I learned the immense value of independence in carving up one’s own areas of theoretical interest and not letting traditional disciplinary boundaries constrain our curiosity. I’m glad to have succeeded at Wason’s selection task in one of his classes, as that event led to many talks on rationality and the hazards it faces and eventually to a friendship thanks to which I’ve grown enormously over the years. I feel grateful for the encouragement and kindness of Roberto González as well as his welcoming me into his research group, where I saw how research gains from being conducted by a friendly and committed team. To Ricardo Rosas I owe the living example that psychological research and a love for literature can be both fruitfully cultivated in unison as well as an invitation to a breakfast where Paul Auster delivered an address on writing; an invitation so wonderful and unexpected that it seemed like a veritable Deus Ex Machina and I shall never forget it. I thank Francisco Ceric for being a model as a masterful lecturer, making the details of brain physiology come fully alive even for someone lacking a solid biological background (and for mercifully, not spoiling the ending of too many series and movies in the process). The School of Psychology at Pontificia Universidad Católica is an institutional home I’m happy to belong to and where I have always felt welcome. Were it not for Bernardita Villarroel’s constant help 2 and patience above and beyond the call of duty, I hesitate to even speculate if that would still be the case. Likewise, I’m happy to have been able to be a part of the Language, Interaction and Phenomenology Laboratory (LIF) and to have had the chance of contributing to the valuable work carried out therein. I will forever be indebted to Diego Cosmelli who invited me to help him organize the lectures that Douglas Hofstadter delivered in Chile in 2014, which eventually led to my spending a year with his research group at Indiana University as a visiting scholar. Francisco Claro’s help was also critical in this regard, and I will never forget how he so deeply and positively influenced the course of my life. I’m thankful to Christian Berger for vouching for this stay abroad during the course of my doctorate, from which this thesis benefitted greatly. Douglas Hofstadter had long been one of my intellectual heroes and the opportunity to work closely with him not only immensely enriched my outlook on Artificial Intelligence and (more importantly) human thinking, but made me realize that his generosity and warmth outshine even his astonishing stature as a writer and thinker. My friend José Ignacio Contreras once wrote that friendship is the most inexhaustible of libraries and I have had ample chance to verify the truth of his statement over these past years from having benefited in refining my thinking on machine intelligence from deep conversations with Kael Becerra, Marcelo Bova, Diego Carrasco, David Carré, Felipe Cuadra, Ana María Cvitanic, Pedro González, Conrado Hayler, Andrea Lobos, Sofía Ormazabal and Juan José Valenzuela. Special thanks go to Esteban Hurtado, who orchestrated my first meeting, long ago, with the theoretical implications of Turing machines and also taught me what small amount of coding I’m capable of today (an amount which I never lose the hope of increasing). To my advisor, Carlos Cornejo, I owe more than I can articulately convey. He has been a fundamental inspiration as a scholar and as a human being, and I am glad to have had the great fortune of learning from him, first as a teaching assistant, then as a research assistant and now as his doctoral student, ever since the day that as an undergraduate I chanced to ask him what the difference was between the words ‘Seele’ and ‘Geist’, a question that having underwent several metamorphoses, to this day I still pursue. He is the best embodiment I know of that C.P. Snow’s divide between the two cultures can be bridged and his research offers constant proof that if psychology is not aware of its past it will be blind to its future. 3 My parents have shown me love, faith and support beyond belief, and if there is one thing to fault them with it is only not having provided me with one of those unhappy childhoods that crowd wisdom credits as an indispensable requirement for talent in all things literary. My brothers, Pablo and Renzo, remained upstanding and productive members of society, thus providing much needed cover in the family for the prodigal son to pursue his academic passion. Finally, my caring and patient partner, Blanca, has constantly reminded me of the joy, liveliness and sparkle that machines cannot yet provide. 4 Index Dedication . 1 Words of Thanks . 2 Index . 5 Introduction: AI Concerns Us All . 6 Paper 1: Echoes of Myth and Magic in the Language of Artificial Intelligence . 23 Paper 2: Computing Machinery and the Benefit of the Doubt . 56 Paper 3: Gamifying Programs . 84 General Discussion: Creators, Creatures and Creativity . 116 Endnotes . 128 5 Introduction: AI Concerns Us All Roberto Musa G. "I hold in awe both the discoveries of philosophy and those who have made those discoveries; and I thrill to claim what is, as it were, an inheritance from many predecessors. Everything they collected, everything they labored over, was for me! But let us do what a good head of household does: let us add to our endowment. May it be a larger inheritance when it passes from me to posterity. Much work remains to be done, and always will: nothing prevents those born a thousand generations hence from making their contribution.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 2005, p. 184 There is an old German saying: “Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen” (whose functional English rendering is the austere “practice makes perfect” while its literal meaning alludes to the unwillingness of the skies to rain ready-made experts down upon us). Gauss, Pascal and Newton have done their share to make us doubt the truism, but what can’t be argued is that it certainly applies to the three essays that follow, which grew organically and laboriously out of my encounter with a domain that I perceive as gaining greater influence upon our collective future. Like a moth to a flame, I have been fascinated by the ever-increasing currency of ever-intelligent machines in our public discourse and our private lives, and I hope to have captured some of that wonder for the benefit of my readers in the pages that follow. If media stories and statements by prominent intellectuals are to be taken as suitable indicators, there is a surge of renewed public interest in the development of Artificial Intelligence. The label has moved from being a distant and speculative buzzword into a household name. Should it surprise us that so many among our files walk the streets feeling they carry the seeds of an impending AI revolution already in their pockets, in the form of their “smart” (and who knows how long until those quotation marks of hesitation strike us as definitely unfair) assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and (the less sexily named) Google Assistant? Grandmothers are worrying about it and for good reason. Elon Musk is worried too and so was the late physicist Stephen Hawking. 6 In a way, this should not be surprising for even if research in AI has had to face its fair share of budgetary winters throughout its rocky history—or perhaps rather, sandy history, as per AI’s indebtedness to silicon—it is a topic that has always been able to grip the imagination. In the three essays that follow I hope to convince the reader that the roots of the fascination that AI arouses lie in the echoes it awakens in us.
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