Post-Sensory

They have managed to nail computer vision, and the abilities of machines discern sounds and create speech are better than ever. Presently, the focus has been on the sense of touch – and the interfaces are focusing on the tactile, trying to refine it and give it the quantity (and at times quality) so that a machine may experience it the same way. But taste is what I want them to define next to a machine.

Computer Taste. Taste Recognition. As absurd as it sounds.

Vision and sound have probably been the easiest of sensory experiences for us to mechanize and digitize.  Taste, I feel, shall probably be the last and the most difficult of all senses to replicate. Even with the most refined of present sensor-tech we have created that can detect and quantify a change in the natural world, taste is something at a higher level, it is a combination of the other senses. It is where the touch, smell and vision come into play together. Even with combinations of individual sensor-values affecting brain activity for each item tasted, what we would be able to create further from a model trained on this would only give us the brain activity equivalent, and it would not be replicating the sensation itself.

But maybe it will be possible one day, when the total sensory input gets strong enough to surpass taste, where taste is not necessary as a more powerful sensory dimension would exist in its place and be much more useful to an artificial super-intelligence. It would be like tasting one’s food by just by the sight or smell of it, like how we do countless times in passing.

That sensory dimension sounds a lot like desire.