Can AI Breathe? Or, Where Humanity Ends and the Automaton Begins
Where exactly is that boundary between AI — machine — and human — biological? What’s interesting is that this boundary is more permeable than you may think, it’s not as rigid or fixed or as perceivable as you might expect. And as we’ll see, this boundary is critical to our understanding of the question.
This article can — and in fact it is recommended to — be listened to.
The actual conception of AI is loosely based upon studies of brain functioning. Our brain is on one level, a very powerful collection of neurons which fire and transmit electric signal between neurons. And actually there’s a very strong parallel between brain functioning and some forms of modern Artificial Intelligence.
In a typical deep learning AI, we have a network or lattice of neuron-like nodes, all of which fire in proportion to the strength of the particular signal received from other nodes. Whilst the typical network — the typical deep learner — is not of the scale of even the most simple of organisms, there nevertheless is a very significant parallel between modern AI and biological minds.
So to cut to the chase of this article’s title, if you listen to a state-of-the-art text-to-speech AI you might be able to pick out breathing noises, you might be able to hear breathing within this article and the reason for that is because the human input-data or human speech input-data has been synthesised by the algorithm to actually include the natural breathiness of speech.
So there is an artificial breathiness to the entire narration. And that means that every narrative that is narrated by a text-to-speech AI actually contains within it breath utterances or breath noises. And this is simply because the input data which the system or computer has used to generate the speech has actually included and not dis-cluded the human breath noises we make as we inhale or exhale, as we pronounce words, as we breath between words. And all of that is included in the narrative.
So to answer the question, “Can AI breathe?” In a sense, yes! And as to the boundary between Humanity and the Automaton, perhaps I’m not so sure of its existance! We’ll leave that question to the philosophers of AI! 🤔
