The English pronoun (EnPronoun) module of the MindForth artificial intelligence substitutes a personal pronoun in place of a noun under discussion, so that thinking or conversation may flow more smoothly.
1. History
The EnPronoun (English pronoun) module is so new that the MindForth project has no legacy webpages describing it. It became necessary to create the EnPronoun module during the development of MindForth code for the answering of user input queries in the what-do-X-do format. If the user asks, "What do robots do?", it is only natural to use the English pronoun "they" in response, rather than repeating the noun "robots" in the answer. It was also easy for an AI coder to replace plural nouns with "they" and not have to worry about the agreement in gender between a singular pronoun and its antecedent. However, once the EnPronoun module existed, it was easy to take the next step of adding an mfn gender flag to the AI MindGrid and to code agreement between noun and pronoun with respect to gender.
2. Implications
As AI Minds evolve, the emergence of each new feature in mental functionality has implications for further development and for the approach of a Technological Singularity. In the case of the EnPronoun module, the implications are rather broad and sweeping. Before there was an EnPronoun module in MindForth, the AI Mind could at first think only about plural nouns, and then more recently about a singular noun when the AI became able to detect a singular stem within the input of a plural form. For instance, if the AI knew the word "books", it was able to understand that singular "book" and plural "books" were the same concept. This ability was not innate; it had to be coded into the AI Mind.
As we augment the MindGrid with a lexical flag to keep track of gender, and we encode the handling of gender in the generation and comprehension of sentences of thought, MindForth becomes a better candidate AI for "porting" or translation into software that will handle gender-intensive human languages such as German, Russian, Spanish, French and Italian. When our use of pronouns causes the AI to develop a facility in handling gender, MindForth draws considerably closer to becoming a bilingual AI that speaks and thinks in both English and German. It could have become a bilingual AI in English and Latin, but we have not yet developed the time-travel feature that will teleport the AI back into ancient Roman times when Latin was the lingua franca of the civilized world. Instead, we must make do with the language of Beethoven and Nietzsche and Heinrich Heine, not Vergil.
Table of Contents (TOC)
- 1 History
- 2. Implications
