When those cultures speak back to Siri, it also need to understand the 20 different cultures or 30 different cultures way of expressing the same concept.

I was one of the more trusted people in the open community for Apple to reach out, and so I worked with their computational language team, and also what we call localization team, taking the same concept that Siri tries to say, and say it in 20 different languages in ...

Apple was one of the companies that are somewhat unfamiliar with this culture, and the bridge makers to this culture are very much needed from inside Apple. Microsoft, for example, or IBM has already reached out to this community early on. IBM was perhaps the first of the large company ...

For me, I also relinquish what we call the right of attribution, meaning that if I write a text, but then you take it and say you wrote it, I’m fine with it, so I completely relinquish my copyright. Because of this practice, and also a very similar practice by ...

Wikipedia is the best known example. Anyone can edit my words on Wikipedia, as long as they agree to let other people in the future also edit in the same way.

Usually, to protect this open source, people abandoned what we call exclusive rights of readers, meaning that people can just take my work, and then go ahead and produce better work.

My job is like a bridge. There is a world called open source technology, which means people who abandon most of our copyright, or in my case, all of my copyright.

Well, I’m just saying it can’t be easily proven that it’s not cognition. I’m not saying it’s human.

Sure. But if you can relate to your inner experience and produce a expression, which when seen from the outside there is no difference — if you can’t tell the difference whether it produced from a human subjective experience versus a non-human subjective experience, then operationally, I would say that ...

Most mammals, and certainly cats and dogs and pigs and so on, are capable of having subjective feelings, that is to say qualia.

Which basically says most mammals, and maybe other vertebrates — certain birds — and maybe octopus are capable of consciousness.

It’s in the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, that’s one of the founding documents of the current animal ethics.

Dogs and cats produce meanings also. Humans don’t have a monopoly...

I’m not saying that it produce something human.

No, they don’t act like the human.

I think that it means that they were now capable of producing the same kind of understanding of the styles or the content in such messages.

The same applies to, for example, contrapunctus, composing of melodies according to certain rules. If you interweave Bach or some other composer with a style transfer from a machine intelligence doing the composing, people in the audience can’t tell the difference.

Of a real producing of a new meaning? Just take computational poetry or computational symphony composing. There is now no way for people to tell between authentic human poets output and synthetic computer poets output. That is to say, when it comes to poems, it’s already passed the Turing test, ...

Of course. Today they already are, so it’s not a matter of when, it’s already there.

That’s right. To relate to the episteme, to the knowledge in the message.

It is what we use as the operational definition for teaching children, for example.

Just like as in humans, it means that if you read something, or you hear something, and later you ask some questions, they were able to answer based on their cognitive capturing of the content of what they have learned.

No, I’m just saying they’re capable of understanding, as cognitive engines, cognitive agents.

When we’re saying people, we usually say they’re moral agents. That’s what "people" means.

I’m not saying they’re people. I’m saying that they’re capable of cognition or understanding. This is not saying they’re people.

These are two fields that are not really related, but because of the way that I tackled those two fields, I tend to blend them together.

There is another field, a different field, called programming languages. It’s about how to make machines programmable and understandable by humans. That’s the other direction.

One field is called computational linguistics, meaning that using computers to understand human language.

These are two different fields.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe I would if I see him, like with you on a meeting like this. But across the Internet it’s just another email address. [laughs]

I don’t know. 16? Something like that.

I also learned about his current research about what today we would call stylometry, to use computers to discover style, and transfer styles, and so on. I learned a lot about that.

I was very surprised. We talk mostly about translation and about that poem.

Who speaks Mandarin, much to my surprise. I didn’t know that he speaks Mandarin. He was able to correct my pinyin.

I initially contacted him because I wanted to share my translation of Carol Hofstadter, his wife’s rendition of a French poem. I translated her English translation of the French poem to Mandarin, and then shared it with Hofstadter...

I was very interested into his thoughts. Also, because I was a translator, I was very interested in translation, and also computer translation. I find many of his thoughts very refreshing.

I read his books, of course, the "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and then later a book on translation, on Clément Marot’s poem. He wrote a lot about the intersection between computers, and language, and then art. He seemed to think, taken together, consciousness can be explained based on those three different ...

I joined this very long tradition -- well not very long, since the ’70s -- a somewhat long tradition of people who learn, not by themselves, but across the Internet together.

Then they have their own discussion boards, their own reading classes, and their own chat rooms. It is very popular and, actually, a commonplace thing, even before the World Wide Web, back when the Internet still only has its forums. It’s called Usenet. People are already learning literature and philosophy ...

On the Internet there are full of people who don’t have a good supporting structure for learning literature, so they formed what we call interest groups online, because they’re interested in the same thing.

No, it’s not, because I met a lot of fellow students who learned this way.

...because that was when people were very optimistic. That’s the message.

It’s all the way from the classics, from Plato, and whatever, and to the First World War, but nothing after the First World War I can read online because they are still under copyright. So I have a very lopsided, optimistic view of civilization...

I didn’t have access to anything that’s written after the First World War, because they are under the copyright.

It’s not junior high school classmates, but it’s still a learning circle, if you will.

Not really by myself, because I have people to talk with, to talk about it.

Because they are public domain, they are free of charge, so I can read them. If I don’t understand, I talk with professors, with my parents, with people that I met online. It’s a normal learning process.

On the Internet there was a project called the Gutenberg Project. They tried to digitize, that is to say to type all the classics that’s out of the copyright, that’s in the public domain into the digital books.

No, I don’t think I learned particularly quickly. It’s like learning a new language. If you are exposed to any language when you are 12, then you tend to learn quickly, and when you are 5, then you learn even more quickly. But if you are 50, then, of course, ...