Language Log

The buzz about Large Language Models has re-ignited interest in Alan Turing's famous 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Two interesting recent discussions: Jessica Riskin, "A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head", NYRB 6/25/2023, and Mustafa Suleyman, "The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma", Random House 9/5/2023.

Suleyman's book won't be released until 9/5/2023, so it's interesting that several outlets have blurbed one of its ideas ten weeks early: Brad Stone, "AI Leader Proposes a New Kind of Turing Test for Chatbots", Bloomberg 6/20/2023, and Sawdah Bhaimiya, "DeepMind's co-founder suggested testing an AI chatbot's ability to turn \$100,000 into \$1 million to measure human-like intelligence", Business Insider 6/20/2023.  Based just on Business Insider's title, Suleyman's proposal puzzled me, since we don't usually think of machine-trading systems as measuring intelligence — at least not the intelligence of the system rather than its designer. But in fact Suleyman has something different in mind, more along the lines of  an extended "shark tank" competition:

In describing his proposal, Suleyman argues that there’s a misplaced focus in the tech industry on the distant possibility of achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI: algorithms with cognitive abilities that match or exceed humans’. Instead, he said the more achievable and meaningful short-term goal is what he calls artificial capable intelligence, or ACI: programs that can set goals and achieve complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

To measure whether a machine has achieved ACI, he describes a “modern Turing test” — a new north star for researchers — in which you give an AI \$100,000 and see if it can turn the seed investment into \$1 million. To do so, the bot must research an e-commerce business opportunity, generate blueprints for a product, find a manufacturer on a site like Alibaba and then sell the item (complete with a written listing description) on Amazon or Walmart.com.

Suleyman expects AI will pass this more practical threshold sometime in the next two years. “We don’t just care about what a machine can say; we also care about what it can do,” he writes. And when that happens, he says, “The consequences for the world economy are seismic.”

That's the name of a viral YouTube channel that I had never heard of, and now a popular book that Barbara Phillips Long called to my attention:

Having just written about "Drainage issues" (6/25/23), with a graphic depiction of what causes the problem with the drainage system in question, I am emboldened finally to answer a question that one of my graduate students has been asking about for several years.  Namely, why do Chinese say "pull poo / shit / excrement" (lāshǐ 拉屎 / lā dàbiàn 拉大便)?  What's the logic of that usage?  How can one pull excrement when one defecates?  Wouldn't it make more sense to say "push" (tuī 推)?  Think about it.  A bowel movement involves peristalsis,

And what do doctors (and husbands) always say to a woman in labor?  "Push", of course.  And the baby comes out from the birth canal.

Article by Melanie Lidman in The Times of Israel (6/17/23):

Groundbreaking AI project translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform at push of a button

‘Google Translate’-like program for Akkadian cuneiform will enable tens of thousands of digitized but unread tablets to be translated to English. Accuracy is debatable.

Opening and key paragraphs:

Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing, but it is so difficult to read that only a few hundred experts around the world can decode the clay tablets filled with wedge-shaped symbols. Now, a team of archaeologists and computer scientists from Israel has created an AI-powered translation program for ancient Akkadian cuneiform, allowing tens of thousands of already digitized tablets to be translated into English instantaneously.

RobWords for June 24, 2023:

From John Rohsenow:

Photograph taken in Hong Kong:

From AntC:

Seen in a very typical (but delicious) corner eatery in downtown Hualien, Taiwan.

Nancy Kathryn Walecki, "Sound as Ever: Gram Parsons and Harvard’s hand in country rock", Harvard Magazine July-August 2023:

During Parsons’s Burritos era, Thomas left Harvard to write his dissertation in a cabin on Mount Baldy outside Los Angeles. Now more of an older brother to Parsons than a proctor, he would take study breaks with him in town: “It was a whole different world from Heidegger and Wittgenstein.” Once, they met Janis Joplin in a nightclub parking lot. “This is my adviser from Harvard. He’s into phenomenology,” Gram said. “Wow,” replied Joplin. “I believe in ghosts, too.”

Just wow. A video has surfaced showing Prigozhin at the Southern Military District HQ in Rostov-on-Don talking to (and HUMILIATING) Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov. He threatens to blockade Rostov and head for Moscow!

I have extreme trouble understanding Yevkurov and… pic.twitter.com/jGr9gaLB1i

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) June 24, 2023

I promised that I would tell the story of how five old, white men persuaded me to begin the study of Asian languages two years after I was out of college.  Here it is.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 1965, I joined the Peace Corps for two years in Nepal.  Although I contracted fifteen diseases, some quite serious, lost fifty pounds, and had three nearly deadly trail accidents, the experience was transformative.

I was an English major in college and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde".  At the end of my Peace Corps service, I still wanted to study for a PhD on Chaucer.  So, among other applications to graduate school and for funding, I applied for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.  In those days (1967), that was a very prestigious prize.

The most recent xkcd:

I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.

But in "Linguistic Confusion and the Tower of Babel", National Catholic Register 6/21/2023, Dave Armstrong argues that the usual interpretation of the Tower of Babel story is simply a mistake, due to a bad job of sense disambiguation:

[T]he Hebrew word for “earth” (eretz) can mean many things, including the entire world (e.g., Genesis 1:1, 15; 2:1, 4), but also things like the “land” or “ground” of countries, such as Egypt (eretz mitzrayim) and Canaan (eretz kana’an), the dry land (Genesis 1:10), and ground from which seeds grow (Genesis 1:12). The New American Standard Bible translates eretz: country or countries 59 times, ground 119 times, land 1638 times; compare to earth, 656 instances, and world (3).