Computers are Dumb — and What That Means for Us

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” -Albert Einstein

Ah the (not so) humble computer. The invention that’s catapulted us into a world of constant mass-interconnectivity, answers to almost any conceivable question, and this being funny to millions of people for some godforsaken reason:

The ways in which computers have made our lives more convenient, more capable, and less toilful are numerous and profound. But even with all the advancements we’ve made in designing computer systems that interface smoothly with humans, there are still rough edges where computers are flat-out incapable of understanding basic instructions, fail in unexpected ways, or take nonsensical actions, resulting in the unexpected crash, these robots who can’t quite seem to do something as simple as putting ketchup on a hot dog, or my girlfriend’s Alexa who responded to “Alexa, set a timer for 8 minutes” with a confidently stated: “Setting a timer for 1 minute”. Even AI, for all of the potential it carries in terms of being able to independently solve problems beyond our own capabilities, still has its challenges when interfacing with humans. Like Tay, the AI-driven chatbot released upon Twitter by Microsoft in 2016 that devolved from friendly conversation to spewing obscene hate speech within days. No matter how hard we try there still seems to be a disconnect between how we expect computers to behave, and how they actually behave.

Here are my thoughts on why this human-computer disconnect exists, what we’ve done to try to get around that, why is this disconnect a potentially unsolvable problem, and what are the potential future consequences?

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