Asimo, built by
Honda and the world’s most advanced robot, can run, climb stairs
and converse, but
it still confuses a hand raised with a question and a hand raised
to take a photo.
Courtesy of Honda.
(January 11, 2016) From
Apple’s Siri to Honda’s robot Asimo, machines seem to be getting better and
better at communicating with humans.
But some neuroscientists caution that today’s computers will
never truly understand what we’re saying because they do not take into account
the context of a conversation the way people do.
Specifically, say University of California, Berkeley,
postdoctoral fellow Arjen Stolk and his Dutch colleagues, machines don’t
develop a shared understanding of the people, place and situation – often including
a long social history – that is key to human communication. Without such common
ground, a computer cannot help but be confused.
“People tend to think of communication as an exchange of
linguistic signs or gestures, forgetting that much of communication is about
the social context, about who you are communicating with,” Stolk said.
As two people
conversing rely more and more on previously shared concepts,
the same area of
their brains – the right superior temporal gyrus
– becomes more
active (blue is activity in communicator, orange is activity in interpreter).
This suggests that
this brain region is key to mutual understanding as people
continually update
their shared understanding of the context of the conversation
to improve mutual
understanding.
The word “bank,” for example, would be interpreted one way
if you’re holding a credit card but a different way if you’re holding a fishing
pole. Without context, making a “V” with two fingers could mean victory, the
number two, or “these are the two fingers I broke.”
“All these subtleties are quite crucial to understanding one
another,” Stolk said, perhaps more so than the words and signals that computers
and many neuroscientists focus on as the key to communication. “In fact, we can
understand one another without language, without words and signs that already
have a shared meaning.”
A game in which
players try to communicate the rules without talking or
even seeing one
another helps neuroscientists isolate the parts of
the brain
responsible for mutual understanding.
Babies and parents, not to mention strangers lacking a common
language, communicate effectively all the time, based solely on gestures and a
shared context they build up over even a short time.