Man v Machine (a rant)

There was only one maverick detective with an ink problem, a predilection for chewing on the underbelly of long words, and that was Detective Dogrel. But his brother was also a detective, with much the same DNA: the same, but different genome and the same, but different ink problem. It ran in the family, that and the detective business. Nobody could tell them apart. Not even their poor departed mother, but death had impaired her judgement.

Sergeant Sloth, had no such excuse. Luckily, the left side of his brain was primed, and lateralized for language. Detective Dogrel asked him to call him dD, to differentiate him from the other detective, whom he called Dd.

‘Listen up,’ said dD, ‘we’ve got a suspect’.

‘How’d you do it?’ yawned Sergeant Sloth.

‘We used the machine,’ replied dD or Dd (dependent on your perspective).

‘What’s the machine?’ said Sergeant Sloth, looking bulked up, fatter than usual, as if he had been gorging himself on feed lines over the Festive period.

‘Well, you know, how there’s always an element of aboutness in language?’ smirked dD, who was really Dd.

‘No,’ said dD.

‘Let me spell it out. Language is not about breaking words up, hacking them into increasingly smaller units, such as morphemes. It’s about building them up and showing the tension between how they come to be represented and spoken,’ said dD, taking a deep breath, ‘anatomically, historically, and metaphorically spoken language sits on top of written language.’

‘Gobbledygook,’ said Dd, ‘it all about language patterns. I’m not saying that visual word recognition is not hardwired to speech codes, everybody knows that, but I’m not sure to what extent. What I am sure of is that you need to cut words open, look at their insides and put them back together. That’s what the machine does. The average Sergeant Sloth knows 50 to 100 000 words. You can multiply that by a 100 or 1000 or 10 000 when you try to differentiate between factor and fact, the beginning of a word and its ending. But for the machine it’s an algorithm problem, as simple as automatically putting butter and jam together in the world word pairing competitions. For us humans, words are evaluated against other words, about half a second after they are spoken or read, which is not long enough to evaluate their meaning. But the mind is already jumping ahead of word monogamy, making matches and marriages and celebrating new foundling knowledge. Fester is not faster, for the machine is quicker, and makes no such mistake. It activates phoneme and word nodes and lexical levels, which are linked to each other and overlap. Inhibition is as important as exhibition, and if the machine could choose one word it would be ‘success’.

‘The Germans have got a machine that takes apart a paragraph and identifies the writer.’ The smug look on his face made him look superior and successful, which wasn't a pleasant look one could identify. ‘All they need is one paragraph. Then we’ll get out word serial killer.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dd, ‘there’s the old-fashioned lexical route, and that now sounds like a crime, and there’s the rule based route, that makes up the law. There’s the fast route that slashes through time, and the slow route that meanders like a stream, and falls over, into a word. And there’s the difference between the two, sitting like Schroedinger’s cat, waiting to pounce. But what makes sense, of nonsense, is how we feel. Emotions are a shortcut through words and meaning, splicing them apart, and sewing them together, to create new and different worlds. Without that, words are just ink blots, lying like slabs, dead on the page.’

‘The machine can problem solve,’ said Dd, with a frown, ‘but it cannot understand. It can follow rule based procedures to cut and segment speech. But anaphoric resolution, who did what to whom and where, are not always obvious from the text, especially when indirect speech is involved. The machine can reach a conclusion, but it does not know the answer, because sometimes there is no answer. Coherence sometimes involves more than the meaning of the words it contains. The machine can never get that. Every person has his own dialogue with the text. He brings his own world. Meaning is always an approximation. Language is who we are acted out on the world. It’s about behaviour. It’s not about sitting on a page. There are no right and wrong answers. No truth. Just fabrications of another world.’

‘Put the cuffs on him Sergeant Sloth,’ said dD, ‘he’s said too much, and not enough. I think we’ve got our word killer, right here. The machine identified him as the universal ewe, but he’s as good as signed his confession with that rant.’

‘But I can’t tell who’s who,’ said Sergeant Sloth.

‘Give me the cuffs,’ said dD.

‘Give me the cuffs,’ said Dd.