Dumbsmarten

We need a better word than smart. Or dumb. I’m trying to come up with the word that we’ll use to describe artificial intelligences that fuel our self-driving cars, or enliven digital assistants. These agents are already incredibly smart but incredibly dumb at the same time. They have read everything but forget what they told us last week. They can solve a Rubik’s cube in a blink, which I will never do, but can’t fold a t-shirt, which a child can do; they recognize your face out of billions instantly, but not recognize your boredom; They will crack the lock in a safe in a few seconds but can’t untie a shoelace; or they will beat you in chess, but always lose any other game a kid makes up.

I call this state dumbsmarten. Some hope this dumbsmartness will disappear as AI advance rapidly, but I suspect this character is endemic to the species. It is already clear that specialized AI experts will outsmart general AIs in a particular speciality (like chemistry, or driving), and so over time our AI agents and robots will continue to display super intelligence in some dimensions at the expense of dumbness in others. The First Law of Engineering states that there are always, and will forever be, trade offs. You can not optimize everything, and so by default some dimensions in any mind will be weaker than the others. AI-maximalists acknowledge that is true but claim that the level of intelligence in all vectors will exceed those of humans, so even the stupid parts of a future AI will not look dumb to us.

That may be true in the long run (though I suspect not) but in the near term, we will be stuck with dumbsmart machines.

We’ll find this dumb-smartness infuriating. It will drive us crazy. How can it beat me at chess but be so freakin dumb? We will swear at our self-driving car because it will do stupid things while not driving. We will scream at our AI assistants for being suckered by con agents, despite our assistant’s PhD qualifications. “You dumbsmarten” will become a derogatory insult. There will be comedy sketches about this slip, whole movies based on this paradoxical combination of ultra brilliance and utter stupidity. We have some experience with this state in certain special humans in the past called idiot savants. I find that term for humans degrading. But there is a germ of truth in it for machines. They will be idiot-geniuses. Maybe we call them genidiots.

Our everyday AIs will be brimming with dumbsmarts. They will be so dumbsmarten they can actually be smart enough to know they are stupid! Or stupid enough to not know they are smart. Both at once.

The name for this stance should be a short word because we’re going to use it in anger a lot. Sad to say, I predict the word will also be used about humans, when they act like a machine this way. Perhaps languages other than English already have a word that means dumbsmart? If not dumbsmart, there will be another word coined to mean the same: the state of being supremely brilliant and supremely stupid at the same time.