The Roots of Art
Three million years ago, one of your and my hominid ancestors was living in the Northern part of what is now South Africa. This individual picked up a brownish-red stone and carried it over 32 kilometers to their home - at least a 6-and-a-half-hour hike. For almost 50 years after its discovery in 1924, this stone remained a mystery - why had our ancestor picked it up and carried it such a distance?
The Pebble of Many Faces
The key to solving the mystery was to understand a brain that was similar, yet still different from ours. On one side of the stone, there was a “large brained” face that was obvious to the human paleoanthropologists that were studying it. It’s hard to miss: the stone shows two circular “eyes” pitted deep into the stone that were about the same size as our eye’s iris, a rounded “forehead” complete with a line demarking what could be a “hairline” and an open, gaping “mouth”, and rounded “chin”.
But it wasn’t a human that picked it up, it was an australopithicus. It contained two other faces: a young, laughing, smiling face with a wide jaw and shorter forehead, and if inverted, an old, wrinkled individual with a serious expression. The individual who picked it up likely recognized the two faces, possibly as a friend or family member, but certainly as a likeness of themselves.
Pareidolia
This is the earliest known example of pareidolia, the phenomenon we perceive a familiar pattern where none may really exist. There are many examples, like “The man in the moon”. Some see a rabbit pounding herbs or a woman carrying a bundle of sticks. These images are woven into folklore and customs.
Even if we might not know it, this artifact is extremely important to human culture - it is considered to be the roots of art.
Machine Vision and Bias
If our brains are prone to see these apparitions, and we are creating artificial intelligence to see as we see, what is AI prone to see?
In machine vision, artificial intelligence also has its own pareidolia that we are unable to see. Usually we think of bias in machine learning systems as an error to be avoided, a mistake that will be fixed by better algorithms, more advanced technology, larger data sets. And most of the time we are right to think of it this way. But thinking of it only as a deficit denies our own biases and flaws as only deficits. Especially when our own pareidolia, which is a bias in our cognitive system, we consider full of meaning.
The man in the moon is the source of folklore, and these shared stories connects us with one another. It has shaped human culture for millennia.
Instead of dismissing errors that AI makes as problems to be overcome, what would happen if we respect them as meaningful, and a window into another, artificial mind?
When the AI we are building has an epiphany like our ancestor had 3 million years ago, how might we recognize it? How might we realize it is important, rather than simply an error in the technology we are building?