Can humans and machines understand each other?

By Jonas Ivarsson

Can we ever achieve a shared understanding between humans and machines? Depending on how we approach understanding, the short answer is yes, and no. At the core of this issue lies humanity’s complicated relation to technology, so a careful examination might teach us something about ourselves. The nature of common understanding fundamentally connects to who we are as humans and how we create meaning in our lives.

If a lion could speak, we would not understand it. Such was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s take on the disjuncture between life-worlds. The everyday lives of our two species are so fundamentally different that very little meaning would carry across the divide. Even if words were present, unsurmountable obstacles would remain.

Today it is the inner lives of machines that are up for discussion. Specialized technologies have been gifted with language—previously a distinctly human capacity. These developments are currently making headlines far outside academic circles, where old questions from the philosophy of AI are brought to the fore: Can machines be conscious or aware? This proposition spurs the imagination and invites speculations on deep existential and ethical mysteries.

If we look past the buzz and the puzzle of sentience, there’s another exciting discussion to have here. It begins by rephrasing Wittgenstein’s formulation about the lion: If a machine could speak, would we understand it? Or rather, now that we have machines that talk with us, what forms of understanding can be had between our different modes of existence? Sorting this out, of course, turns on the entire issue of what constitutes common understanding.

Read the full article on TechTalks.