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When I was working on my Linguistics degree, one of the first things I learned and that was drilled into us, was the concept of “Big C Culture” and “Little/Small C Culture”. Understanding these things, especially Little C culture is key to understanding a massive barrier that is looming in AI.
Big C culture is those people and things that you can look up and learn about. The people and events that were transformative. The Beatles, the Suffrage Movement, F Scott Fitzgerald, taking a knee on a football field.
Little C culture is those things that you cannot really learn about. They are what you experience, see and feel growing up and living somewhere. Little C culture often isn’t verbal or even textual and is very hard to describe. Even beginning to capture it is what our best writers do.
It’s what Little C culture is that AI is not and has not captured. It’s what AI and AGI are trying to get to. Getting emotional when a certain older song plays. Hearing a phrase like “Do you feel lucky, punk?” and starting to laugh because it became an inside joke among your friends. Talking about the spaceship Challenger and remembering the conflicting emotions when it happened and what you were doing. Smelling popcorn on the wind and having a shared memory pop up of times in the past.
These are all examples of Little C culture. They are things people experience. That emotion, that experience, colored our vocabulary and what we see, what we feel and how we perceive and react. The collection of words around these experiences are more than the sum of their parts. They are not literal. You cannot build a model of these Little C experiences, phrases and collections of similar words and begin to understand their real meaning. And you miss the real meaning either as it’s communicated or in trying to formulate a communication that touches people.
This is the AI cultural understanding gap and it prevents an AI from ever really communicating or reasoning like a human. Because people use aspects of Little C culture every day. References to movies that were popular and still have hidden meanings. Phrases that were particularly popular for a bit but have a meaning that is deeper. References to favorite restaurants and meals, real or fake (“Juicy Lucy”, “fist sandwich”). The feeling of how popular sports teams screwed up the last play of the game and made a whole state upset (“Wide Left”). We use these to communicate and evoke feelings and connection.
So, if understanding these words and Little C culture is key to behaving like a human and really understanding the meaning behind words and the people saying them, how is that gap bridged? At this point I am not convinced it can be. The reason is that AIs have no sense of self, no emotions and no sense of impermanence. And therefore, they have no sense of “feelings” tied to events and experiences. And without those things Little C culture won’t have a context for an AI model. And without that they cannot sympathize with the phrases they see and hear, nonetheless construct relevant equivalents.
So can this gap be bridged? That is the subject of the next article.