I’ve been thinking about this with the recent rapid expansion of neural net image generation and interpretation.
I think most of our analogies are highly visual in their nature - we take the metaphorical and give it physical form, and through that mapping gain a common understanding of abstract topics. Our minds largely evolved around being able to make sense of and operate within the visual world, so it would make sense for our cognition to be tied into that ancient and massively powerful compute element. It’s embedded throughout human culture and language, so is likely not an emergent phenomenon but an inherent property of our minds.
On that basis, I wonder if we’re nearer than we think. I’m absolutely not an AI researcher, and it probably shows, but perhaps a visual intermediary is the key to generating a useful understanding of analogies in a way that maps well to the human understanding of analogies, and thus brings us a step closer to a general purpose AI.
I think most of our analogies are highly visual in their nature - we take the metaphorical and give it physical form, and through that mapping gain a common understanding of abstract topics. Our minds largely evolved around being able to make sense of and operate within the visual world, so it would make sense for our cognition to be tied into that ancient and massively powerful compute element. It’s embedded throughout human culture and language, so is likely not an emergent phenomenon but an inherent property of our minds.
On that basis, I wonder if we’re nearer than we think. I’m absolutely not an AI researcher, and it probably shows, but perhaps a visual intermediary is the key to generating a useful understanding of analogies in a way that maps well to the human understanding of analogies, and thus brings us a step closer to a general purpose AI.