Comment by Xss3
14 days ago
Dogs out of all creatures probably actually do have some parsing going on for human language. They learn it like we do, picking up context from the environment, actions, tone, facial expressions, body language, etc.
You can say 'what's that' in many different ways and a clever dog will react differently for each, even if it's the first time it's heard you say 'what's that?' In a scared tone it'll still react differently while knowing what you're asking.
They even do the cute head tilt when they're struggling to understand something.
I think people vastly underestimate the power of wetware and think animals and us are separated by a chasm, but I think it's a relatively small leap.
We base so much of our understanding of other creatures intelligence on their ability to communicate with us or express things in the ways we do. If elephants judged humans on their ability to communicate in infrasound to speak their names (yes they have names for each other) they'd wouldn't think too highly of us.
Sidenote but the latest I've heard is that elephants like us because they think we are cute.
Oh sure, dogs definitely learn, they have about a 2 year old's level of intellect if I remember correctly? I just meant as example to the train/response thing. I believe the issue is their brains just aren't going to continue "leveling up" the way a human's does as it grows. My assumption is that this is because the AI isn't actually "understanding and thinking", but just acting according to its training. A program following source code, rather than rewriting its own source code, as it were.
Parsing? I don't think dogs "parse" language in a decompositional matter.
If they don't parse words to form an understanding of their meaning what are they doing?