Author: John Ball

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    A Thought Experiment to Improve AI

    ByJohn Ball

    Why aren’t artificial neural network systems replacing people? In AI, machines should replicate what we do, not perform statistical calculations. What can we do with a thought experiment to improve our AI? Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash Progress in AI and AGI has had slow enterprise adoption because today’s generative AI don’t work as predicted by big tech CEOs. We’re told fantasy stories about how all of science will soon be solved by machines that gather the statistics from existing scientific papers. But if the scientific papers included the answers to future science, what benefit do we get from AI, since the science is already written? AI today is obviously missing the key piece – how the world works in all its multisensory glory…

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    Upcoming Book: Modern Cognitive AI

    ByJohn Ball

    How to build AI that’s like us and its benefit to society! Language, like our ability to navigate the world with our senses and muscles, comes from our brain. AGI needs better ‘cognitive AI.’ We choose our words carefully, because amazing precision is what our brain does. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash I’m writing a new book explaining how AGI works with cognitive AI. I will publish the sections for comment before the final book is compiled. You’ll be able to follow in LinkedIn, Speech Genie, Substack and Medium for the series. I invite you to debate and correct me where you disagree with the model. I want to shine the torch on much-needed science, so let’s do some science! My goal is to…

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    Understanding isn’t just memorization

    ByJohn Ball

    We learn all the time, continuously, regardless of our age. We never stop, but would it surprise you that many scientists propose the model where we stop learning while we are young? That is false, although more research would help prove the point. We just need some people to use experimental science!   Inside view of the ground floor of a Starbucks in Tokyo – wow! The perfect venue to learn more about language and our ability to understand — with coffee!   OK, how can I claim that learning doesn’t stop while we are young? Why so confident? Do you know the (made up) word Preada? It’s a brand that sells glasses, like Prada. Preada puts additional effort (E) into the designs of Prada,…

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    New language model for human conversation!

    ByJohn Ball

    The breathtaking view from Kobe University looking over Osaka Bay – home to the RRG 2025 bi-annual conference. Linguistic Conference: RRG 2025 The linguistic conference in Kobe, Japan, has just wrapped up. Expert linguists from around the world gave English presentations of progress over 2 days in a variety of languages including: Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Breton, Vietnamese, German, Mandarin, Mexican languages, Taiwan Sign language, and a range of African languages. They all use RRG as the model of communications. Primary developer, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., has continued work on and growing the global community since the early 1980s. What makes Van Valin’s contributions so significant in the 20th and 21st century is its adoption of a model in which the words in a language…

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    Magic from the Speech Genie

    ByJohn Ball

    Learning a new language as an adult is difficult, requiring years of work to progress. Or does it? Today’s discussion is with Chris Lonsdale, the creator of Kungfu English, a system designed to mimic his success in learning Mandarin and Cantonese as a 20-year-old. Subscribe now Chris is a language educator and psycho-linguist whose system has been teaching Mandarin Chinese speakers how to speak English since the early 2000s. I have started working with him to integrate my brain-based AI solution with a more general version of his language learning application — the result? Introducing Speech Genie! The first available languages will be English and Mandarin. The magic of the Genie is in using your brain’s capabilities to learn language in a way that mimics…

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    What’s missing from AI – Part 1

    ByJohn Ball

    Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned the linguistics world from the science of signs (semiotics) to one aligned with one of the great scientists in history, Pāṇini, who lived perhaps as far back as the 7th century BC. The use of Pāṇini’s linguistic model by Leonard Bloomfield led to linguistics excluding meaning, such as in the influential Chomsky monograph, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957. My proposed move back to semiotics is a side effect of the highly influential work of Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., whose development of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) over the past 40+ years creates a clear distinction between the words and phrases in a language (morpho-syntax) and their meaning in context (contextual meaning). RRG views the world’s diverse languages with a…

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    Patom Theory Understands the Meaning Behind Language

    ByJohn Ball

    For most of my life, I have pondered a question that sits at the very center of howour brain works: how do we understand language?The question isn’t how we repeat language, nor how we recognize its surfacepatterns, but how we understand its meaning in context. If you ask ten expertsabout this subject, called Natural Language Understanding or NLU, you will getten different definitions because there are many theories available in academia!These tend to have origins in the 1950s or before and can be seen as validcompetitors in the absence of working solutions.But to most people, understanding is simple. It is the moment when wordsconnect to meaning. You do not ‘predict’ meaning (a popular paradigm in today’smachine learning community): you experience it. To many of us,…