Today I spent some time watching a thriller, The Reaping and it made me think about why it’s sometimes so hard for some people to watch some of this movies. In my opinion, it all goes back to the way we can understand the world outside us: we put ourselves in the shoes of the people that we are observing. However, we don’t quite get that imagining us in a fantasy world where there are people out there planning on killing us might not be a good idea.
Minds never stop where they should, right? So after giving up in watching the movie (it’s not that it’s a terrible movie, but it was close to 1 AM and I probably should be going to bed to enjoy a long Sunday) I started thinking about intelligence and how one can simulate it. If most of our ability to understand people comes from this “self-projection” ability, how can we make an algorithm understand people? Are we algorithm too? Is this the best that it can ever hope to achieve?
Let’s consider that our computer is a dog. The dog looks at us and realizes that our face is pointing in the direction of a toy, but we don’t jump on it. So the dog “thinks”: well, if I was this person and was looking at the toy, the only reason I wouldn’t jump on it and bite it is if I’m sick. So maybe he is sick and I should be away from him. Quite restrictive conclusion.
That’s probably not what we are looking for when we think of computer understanding. So what can be done? Put all our learners in Second Life? 
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