
Are only poets safe from robots? - kawera
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/are-only-poets-safe-book-review-the-future-of-the-professions-richard-susskind-daniel-susskind
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pmoriarty
"...give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." [said Trurl the
Constructor, to his friend Klapaucius].

Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:

"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the
language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology
and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the
cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began,
but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

    
    
      Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
      Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
      Their indices bedecked from one to n,
      Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
    
      Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
      And every vector dreams of matrices.
      Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
      It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
    
      In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
      Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
      Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
      We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
    
      I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
      Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
      And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
      And in our bound partition never part.
    
      For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
      Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
      Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
      Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
    
      Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
      Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
      A root or two, a torus and a node:
      The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
    
      Eclipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
      The product of our scalars is defined!
      Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
      Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
    
      I see the eigenvalue in thy eye,
      I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
      Bernoulli would have been content to die,
      Had he but known such a^2 cos 2ϕ!
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad)

------
thewarrior
Yes I agree entirely.

Poetry is one of the purest forms of human expression. By human expression I
mean the combination of ideas and emotions.

Even after the AI has acquired a language model and knowledge of rhyme and
meter , and even perhaps a crude world model, A robot writing poetry would
need to know what emotions something would typically evoke in order to write
about it.

For eg: to write a poem about a rotting pile of carcasses , or cockroaches it
would require an innate understanding of how humans react to these things.
What they might feel , the physical response and the visceral aspects of the
reactions evoked.

You could machine learn your way through thousands of poems and understand how
lots of things feel but to produce true poetry the machine would have to
completely imbibe our ideas of beauty and self.

What objects are beautiful vs not beautiful , what sounds are harmonious vs
dissonant and jarring , what kinds of faces are attractive vs ugly and so on
and on and on...

For example , what would it feel like to fly ?

I'm not talking about the air rushing past , or looking down upon the world
you whoosh past overhead.

The one word that comes to my mind is a sense of exhilaration. Freedom.
Perhaps a fear of heights.And I bet that's what came to your mind as well. But
would our AI poet come to the same conclusion ?

So this is not just AI Complete but an AI Insane problem. To appreciate and
create poetry is to be human.

~~~
bhickey
_Why_ do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language
processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly
rudimentary task. Tell your model about meter, tell it about rhyme, learn word
associations. Pick a language, give it every line of poetry you can find and
hit go. What makes you think you could distinguish computational verse from
something written by human hands?

Try these examples. Which ones were written by people?

a)

    
    
        A home transformed by the lightning 
        the balanced alcoves smother 
        this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.
    

b)

    
    
        For it matters not, how much we own;
        the cars ... the house ... the cash.
        What matters is how we live and love
        and how we spend our dash.
    

c)

    
    
        It is really hard to
        break bad news without crying
        or falling apart.

~~~
bpicolo
(a) seems inherently robotic via the phrase "insatiable earth of a planet,
Earth.".

That said, there are certainly poems that could go both ways. But art is a
weird environment: It's not necessarily a piece in and of itself that creates
human interest in there. I'm sure there are a lot of `great poems` out there
that nobody cares about because they weren't written by some great poet.

~~~
bhickey
(a) is indeed written by a machine, (b) is excerpted from a famously awful
poem, and (c) is an unintentional haiku found in the New York Times.

I agree with what you're saying about art, but it's far afield of the point
thewarrior was making.

------
csense
Seems like poetry is something that could be automated fairly easily.

For example a limerick is:

(1) u u S u u S u S (2) u u S u u S u S (3) u S u u S (4) u S u u S (5) S u u
S u u S

where u means unstressed syllable and S means stressed syllable. With the
additional constraints that the last symbol in lines {1,2,5} and {3,4} form
rhyming sets.

Would be straightforward to build, once you have information about rules for
stressed / unstressed syllables and rhyming. Use a grammar checker to make
sure the result makes some kind of linguistic sense.

~~~
patrickaljord
[http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm](http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm)

------
cryoshon
Not sure how poets can be considered "safe" from robots when they're already
priced out of being poets for a living by the cost of merely living. Poets
weren't safe from white collar work, nevermind robots.

There is absolutely no economic demand for poets, so there is no incentive for
robots to do their job cheaper or more efficiently.

------
zappo2938
I wonder what T.S.Eliot would say about a robot winning a prize named after
him?

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is
not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to
want to escape from these things."[1] -- T.S. Eliot from 'Tradition and the
Infividual Talent'

In this essay, Eliot uses the metaphor of chemistry to describe the poetic
process. However, I think using the metaphor of the chemical process inside
the ribosome is a better analogy. The poet's mind takes a finite amount of
emotions and feelings as there are a finite amount of condons which can be
processed through a ribosome in an infinite number of ways to create all sorts
of proteins [2] as the poet can move the reader to experience new feelings.

Whereas a computer can test if a new protein will bind to a cell or act in a
certain way, the computer doesn't have the ability to quantify if a reader is
experiencing a new feeling or epiphany. Or perhaps, a person can be placed in
a MRI machine so the computer can have a feed back loop.

A good example of the artistic process that T.S.Eliot described is how George
Lucas, who has said in interviews that T.S.Eliot has influenced his work,
stitched together several scenes from dog fights in WWII movies [3] using
physical images of things that are familiar to the audience like planes and
words, "I got him," to create a new feeling for people to experience. Lucas
and Eliot also had the same goal of using art to affect people into a
spiritual experience.

Edit: I don't know how to English.

[1]
[http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/traditi...](http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/tradition.htm)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY)

[3] [http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv)

------
singularity2001
KING LEAR: O, if you were a feeble sight, the courtesy of your law, Your sight
and several breath, will wear the gods With his heads, and my hands are
wonder'd at the deeds, So drop upon your lordship's head, and your opinion
Shall be against your honour.

[https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-
effectiveness/](https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)

There goes Shakespeare

------
rkabir
[https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet](https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet)

------
ommunist
pmoriarty just cited one. I have the other:

“Mockles! Fent on silpen tree, Blockards three a-feening, Mockles, what silps
came to thee In thy pantry dreaming?

“Well, that’s an improvement!” shouted Trurl, not entirely convinced. “The
last line particularly, did you notice?”

Excerpt From: Lem, Stanislaw. “The Cyberiad.” Continuum Book, 1965.

