Digital Integration and the Chinese Room

The Chinese Room is a famous thought experiment in which a slip of paper written in Chinese is handed to a mysterious machine or room. Within this room or machine, are systems which interpret the Chinese into English. With an English translation, it formulates a response. This response is applied through the same systems to translate the English into Chinese characters. At the end of it all, the machine or room spits out a new slip of paper responding in Chinese.

While this sounds like a complex Rube Goldberg contraption, it really is a simple interpretation of a translation machine, written out as a thought experiment before technology could allow for said translation.

The point of the thought experiment is to ask the reader: does the Chinese room understand Chinese? In the thought experiment, there is an infinite and always accurate amount of translations the Chinese room can handle. But because it has to go through an interpretative process and is unable to directly communicate in Chinese, the Chinese room fails to meet the criteria of truly understanding the language. It must consistently rely on tools to interact with the language.

How does the Chinese Room apply to ourselves and our world outside of the analogy of language? Do we operate by reading symbols and characters, filing and sorting interpretations, and respond with said initial symbols and characters? I’d largely say yes, especially as we spend more time in digital spaces with computers and smartphones. Interpretation of spaces and boundaries, expression with colloquialisms or memes, and societal expectations have shifted our language and the tools we use to express ourselves.

This is most easily observed with the pre-Internet generation interacting with the post-Internet generation. The ability to communicate on a meaningful level has changed, not because of the nature of English or whatever common language is shared. Rather our ability to navigate and interact with spaces has dramatically changed. From the globalization of our supermarkets to the globalization of social interaction, our expectations and habits have dramatically shifted and continue to rapidly evolve. The younger generation is quick to adapt and older generations or those who fail to adapt will have a harder time communicating with those who do.

In the Wikipedia article of the Chinese Room, the applied ethics section covers remote military operations and the morality of taking actions upon interpreted data.

The Chinese Room has an intense implication of the Turing Test and determining whether something is human. The question of authenticity or consciousness is a popular existential problem for artificial intelligence. However, the reflection or internal observation of the Chinese Room with ourselves helps us examine what we are becoming as we integrate with technology and how we respond socially to others as our world evolves. The question of does AI truly understand could be inversed to do humans truly live?