Artificial Intelligence and My Dogs

Most readers know about Meic, my Border Collie. Less known is Holly, Karen’s Shih-poo, a Shih-tzu and Poodle cross. (Yeah, I know, you’re expecting me to make some bad joke about crossing Bull Terriers with Shih-tzus, but I won’t.)

Border Collies are generally considered to be the “smartest” of all dog breeds, and frankly, they are pretty sharp. One such dog in Germany could differentiate among about forty different toys by shape and colour. Welsh farmers raised one group of Border Collie puppies in English, another in Welsh, so that they could split commands by language and use the two packs of dogs in co-ordinated, but separate, teams, kind of a sheepy pincer movement. The idea was brilliant and worked amazingly well until the dogs figured it out and became bilingual.

Meic is highly trainable. Holly not so much. So, everybody says that Meic the Border Collie is smarter than Holly the Shih-poo. Well, let’s keep our shirts on here, and think about it.

Meic is trainable because his parents, and their parents, and their parents, all the way back to Old Hemp, the first Border Collie, were genetically selected because they were “biddable”, that is, they responded well to commands. Without a doubt, Border Collies and their predecessor working dogs were also pretty smart and adaptable, solving problems on the fly, but their great strength was that they learned to follow commands and work seamlessly with the farmers.

Holly’s Chinese ancestors were the consorts of royalty, and her Parisian ancestors were the companions of aristocrats, so it is no wonder that Holly’s nickname is “the Princess”. She does as she damned well pleases, comes when it suits her, and does tricks only after evaluating the size and tastiness of the treat being offered.

Around our house, it’s pretty clear who’s boss, who gets the last lick of the gravy dish on the floor, who gets to be on Mum’s bed and who gets chased off, and who gets priority with treats. Do I need to embarrass Meic and spell it out?

Recently we spent some time with one of our daughters in Nova Scotia. She has three dogs, four if you count the dowager Chihuahua who spends her time in the basket. These dogs weigh in between eighty and a hundred pounds. Within two days, ten pound Holly had these creatures under her dominion.

So, what does this have to do with AI and humanity? Well, as much as I love Meic the Border Collie, I’ve got to say he’s more like AI– biddable, programmed to solve problems, follow directions, deal with details, and take care of us. Holly, on the other hand, does what she wants, when she wants, how she wants. But in order to do that, her little mind is going all the time, calculating, triangulating, assessing, making deals, charming, bullying, wheeling, dealing.

So here’s my thesis, like it or not: AI will become our Border Collie, smart, fast, biddable, but here for us. We, on the other hand, will continue to be ornery, opinionated, curious, obstinate, and calculating, using AI to serve our whims.

There are eight billion of us on this planet, all angling for our own survival, each thinking we’ve got the best answers, each ready to assert independence, most of us wrong, but many of us right, a seething mass of contradictions and brilliance. Our orneriness, our wilfulness, our independence and serendipitinousness (is there such a word?) and our care for one another, set us apart from the machine, as clever as it may be.

It will be a long time, if ever, that AI can get its mind around all that. In the meantime, it’s working hard to please us, and that, for now, is not a bad deal.