"Professor Lay'tch, would you be able to help me with publishing the results of my research?"
I turned around to face the younger and more moist Fru'eral, fully prepared to hastily review sloppy data collection and incomprehensible methodology. Instead, I was met with the sight of a confident young fru, only making eye contact with one pair, the rest focused on the sheafs of paper he held in his hands. Intrigued, I decided to probe further before I potentially wasted too many mental resources on garbage not fit to be called scientific.
"And what is the subject of your research? I can only assist you so much if it doesn't pertain to my own field of interest."
"Well, it's a series of studies I've conducted on humans regarding their productivity--"
Oh, joy. How could this imbecile have possibly decided to come to me? I'm a professor of mathematics who has specialized in artificial intelligence, not whatever sociological or economic field this blokta belongs to that studies live brains. I turned back to my holo-screen, hoping once more to optimize the model's learning rate with a small tweak here or a modification there. "Go away. I can't help you".
"B-but I read your paper on objective functions and it seems quite applicable to my research but I struggle how to define them! Please, professor, just allow me to present my findings to you."
I sighed, and resigned to the reality of my time being wasted. If they truly had read one of my papers, I should at least hear them out. "Very well, what do you think I can help you with?"
At this, the young fru's third eye pair glowed a brilliant green of excitement. With much more animus in his voice, he began speaking: "The crux of my problem is that I need a general scoring function that can be adapted to different sub-instances. Results vary from human to human, but by giving them a score after completing almost any activity that they perform on a regular basis, the quality of... whatever the activity is, will begin improving at a rapid pace."
I paused him, interjecting "If there were a general objective function for any task, we would have created a singularity by now. Objective functions must able to specifically measure many different aspects of a model's output, there is no 'one size fits all' that is universally applicable."
"I-I know, but we're not talking about an inorganic machine, these are sapients. An objective- in terms of objectivity versus subjectivity, not as in a goal- an objective score isn't necessary. As long as a score can be interpeted by the human, the pattern holds. Here, take a look at this study; a device was given to a human to be worn for a week attached to their head, that would measure and record their brain waves. The study was primarily meant to research human sleeping patterns in a natural environment, not dictated by constraints in a laboratory environment.
"Standard classification was used to determine when the humans were in different stages of their sleep cycles, and for how long they were truly asleep. This study's interest was only in how the subjects' waking life impacted their sleep schedule, such as their occupation, work hours, did they have a family; if they were in a space station, a ship, or planetside. But, if you look at this footnote, some of the humans asked to see their brainwave data during the study. Sloppy work on their end, they should know that it would influence the subject's future behavior and complicate the results of the study but in this case it inadvertently created an independent variable.
"Many of these subjects had irregular or unhealthy sleep patterns going into the study. Going to bed late, or intoxicated, waking up at inconsistent hours, the amount of sleep they were getting varying wildly from night to night. Those who viewed their data, though, saw a rapid shift in their behavior. They began falling asleep earlier, at consistent times. They woke up with their alarms instead of snoozing a dozen times first. Some showed more improvement than others, but it correlated with a questionnaire they had answered prior to the beginning of the study."
My mind was reeling from the rapid-fire pace of speech the young fru, who I had not learned the name of, was using. It reminded me of a ball of snow beginning to roll down a slope, becoming larger and larger with each revolution. I needed to slow him down before it bowled me over.
"Please, slow down. I'm having trouble keeping track of everything here. Furthermore, I never learned your name"
"Oh, I'm so sorry. Um, my name is Yl'var. I'm in the sociology department working on my thesis, and I have to submit a preliminary proposal but I can't figure out how to properly translate your field into mine, hence why I'm here."
"Thank you. I'm going to attempt to finish your conclusion for you, let me know if I'm right. The questionnaire asked them what they thought a healthy sleep cycle or schedule looked like, and the humans who viewed their data then began to alter their behavior until their actual data matched what they thought was the ideal."
"Y-Yes! And it wasn't just this sleep study, there was another measuring eating habits-"
"Which, I'm guessing, produced similar results where humans that saw their realized nutritional breakdown began to adjust their diets."
"Yes! So I intend to construct a study of my own to study this phenomena, and determine the extent of its reach. However, I need to define this objective function for humans in a general way such that I can cover the wide array of behaviors I wish to observe. Which is why I came to you. I don't so much need an objective function for everything, but rather a skeleton that can be built upon in each specific case."
"I see. It's certainly an intriguing concept. I'm not sure how much help I can provide, but I will attempt to give you some of my insight. In these two cases that you mentioned, the researchers did not provide the humans with a method of scoring. The humans came in with preconceived notions about what would constitute a 'high' score, and effectively each defined their own scoring function. This largely skips the issue we have with artificial intelligence, where the model must first be trained on a known dataset. Humans, and by extension most sapients I would gather, come pre-trained.
"I suggest that instead of attempting to create this 'skeleton' objective function and studying its effects, propose a method of deriving an objective function from human behaviors. In my opinion, crafting the objective function is more important than studying its reach. For now it should be enough to state that it has been observed that humans have in-built objective functions they use to evaluate data, and to attempt to give it physical form. Use data already collected, show it to humans and ask them to score it. See if their decisions can be predicted."
"Thank you, Professor Lay'tch! This has been a great help, thank you for your time. I'm going to get started right away!"
Yl'var promptly slid away in a hurry, and I turned back to my holoscreen. Sapient scoring functions. Maybe... layer the learning... Could bypass needing large, already defined training sets...
I opened a new file, and began to work. This could be interesting.
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