The Perfect Response

The new baseball clock requiring a quick turn-around of pitches made me think of some other uses.

As you probably know, a new rule in baseball requires that a pitcher and hitter take no more than 15 seconds between pitches. A few more seconds are allowed if there is a runner on base or if there is a new hitter coming to the plate. The goal is to speed up the game. And, indeed, pitchers are getting a workout to be ready to send a ball to the plate so frequently.

This clock requiring a quick turn-around made me think of some other uses. It could help whip the rest of us in shape to ‘get on with it’ in good order. Laggards in the ballpark can have a penalty of a ball or strike added to the count, depending on whether they are a pitcher or hitter. In lieu of a “ball!” called on the rest of us, we might learn to live with a marine horn that sounds when we’ve drifted over our allotted time.

Some possible applications:

Aches and pains are always good for comment from those of us who’ve been around a while. But the “organ concert” that results can get mighty tedious. A limit of 20 seconds seems like enough time to recite a recent medical calamity.

I have a friend who likes to tell long stories that we’ve all heard before. We could give these jokes numbers to save time. Or there could be a limit of 20 seconds to get to the end of what we already know.

We have all encountered speakers who pause excessively between words or thoughts. The comics Bob and Ray had a classic illustration of it in their radio bit entitled “Slow Talkers of America.” As a variation, some of us use “silence fillers” before meandering on to an additional thought. This can make us all sound like our brain has hit a molasses patch. The clock and horn might help move things along.

Phone solicitations are never fun. If you get dragged into one, it would be nice to point out that they, too, are on the clock. There would be no time for lengthy verbal fogs that try to conceal their sales intent.

Helpful servers in some restaurants are required to recite all the specials of the day. The fussier the establishment, the longer the list. This tableside oration needs to be done in 20 seconds or less.

I have colleagues in education who like to lecture. I do too. But we are given way too much class time by our institution: about 80 minutes. Most lectures would be more focused if the time were cut in half. And all should be required to come with a preview of no more than 20 seconds. If a person can’t pull that off, the rambling lecture that follows probably has no central theme.

Unfortunately, vacation pictures don’t fade like they did in the last century. We collect them in abundance on our phones. 15 seconds per shot would be generous. A picture with a story to go with it might get 20.

Dinner parties are still a thing with my generation. The food is always good, but a wooden chair can get mighty uncomfortable after two hours. Changing places every 20 seconds would be fun to try, but probably result in quite a mess to clean up. Even if the pitch clock is probably too short to be of much use, it is clear that a long evening assigned to the same broken chair should not run longer than a baseball game.

By necessity, A.I. must assume a kind of fraudulent authorship, easily revealed in meaningless pronouns.

The recent flurry of news about refined A.I. “intelligence” which can process and mimic coherent discourse– if not authentic emotional states—has been hard to miss. But in the breathless rush to proclaim the human-like capabilities of ChatGPT and other language-based systems, something basic has been overlooked. The real deficits of these programs are their incapacities to handle human processes represented in meaningful pronouns.

Obviously, these systems are using language and grammar forms we recognize, but their shortcomings are concealed by their verbosity. We now have chatbots that can talk more than our worst oversharing relatives.

Here’s what’s missing. When we use it, the pronoun “I” is the human equivalent of the North Star. Our awareness of it gives us the power to take ownership of objects, needs, feelings, and a reserved space in what is usually a growing social network. Children learn this early, building an emerging sense of self that expands rapidly in the first few years. Eventually they will distinguish the meanings of other pronouns that allow for the possibility of not just “I,” but “we, “you,” and “them” as well. This added capacity is a major threshold. It’s an immense task to fathom other “selves” with their distinct social orbits and prerogatives. Adequate consideration of another’s “otherness” is a lifelong process that even adult humans struggle to master. As examples of this capacity importance, consider the elaborate backstories of motivation that you routinely apply when talking to a friend or family member. What is heard and what is understood may be two very different things. Understanding others is a delicate process of inference-making that can’t be duplicated by a machine that lacks a requisite social and organic lineage.

This shift to “I” from “we” also enables us to assert intellectual and social kinship, one biological creature to another, bound by an awareness of similar arcs that include learning, living and dying. These natural processes motivate us to assert our own sense of agency: to be engines of action and reaction. We “know” and often boldly announce our intentions, at the same time doing our best to infer them in others. Estimations of motive shape most of our conversations with others. Think of the “I” statements used by others as sitting atop a deep well of attitudes and feelings we struggle to bring to the surface.

So, it is clear that every time Chat GPT composes a message to us, it needs to depend on fraudulent pronouns, stated or implied. It uses forms of everyday language that conceal the fact that it has no resources of the self: no capability to “feel” as a sentient being. This makes it clueless in gaining even a rudimentary sense of what others are about.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Other Uses of the Pitch Clock

A Pronoun Test of A.I. Sentience