Bumper stickers and human consciousness

Intelligent tutors, such as the still-under-development xThink Intelligent Tutor, must have a sense of humor. Otherwise, they cannot become cyber-friends who engage and motivate students.

Today, if you saw our Alpha code for xThink Intelligent Tutor, you might say, “Whoa! Today, the Tutor can barely monitor a student’s math exercises, detect errors in real time, and suggest alternative paths. A sense of humor is a highly advanced skill worthy of a computer that has human-like consciousness.”

And you would be correct. Yet, we are confident that the Tutor’s sense of humor will emerge with all its other skills, over time. One source of our confidence: the Tutor builds its answers from scratch, from a foundation of facts and experience, in response to a specific learning context. No canned speeches or pre-written dialogs.

Soon, the Tutor will take some baby steps toward a sense of humor and conscious-like behavior. It is comforting to see open-minded people who have a sense of humor about consciousness itself. The following humorous bumper stickers (seen on a single car near our headquarters in Round Rock, Texas) provide a case in point:

• You’re just jealous because the voices are talking to me.
• Don’t believe everything you think.

Bumper-sticker 1 is funny, in part, because a person who is normally considered diseased (one who hears disembodied voices) proudly declares herself to be enviable.

Bumper-sticker 1 is significant for the students of consciousness, because it expresses a common analytical approach. For example, Marvin Minsky’s idea on this topic is summarized by the late Push Singh as follows:

. . . every mind is really a ‘Society of Mind’, a tremendously rich and multifaceted society of structures and processes, in every individual the unique product of eons of genetic evolution, milennia of human cultural evolution, and years of personal experience. – – http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html

Bumper-sticker 2 is funny, in part, because it upends the meaning of the aphorism, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Beyond that, the bumper sticker invites us to view our own thought from a meta-perspective. This is the perspective that all students of consciousness seek.

xThinkers wonder what the Tutor’s emergent behavior will teach us about consciousness . . . and what sense of humor the Tutor will apply in the process.