Scarcely a week goes by without us hearing of an advance in artificial intelligence or a new application for it, whether it be medical breakthroughs in interpreting X-rays, DeepMind’s protein folding AlphaFold leading to drug discoveries, or the astonishing, humanlike performance of large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s Chat GPT or Google’s Gemini. It is all the more remarkable to realize that LLMs can generate screeds of relevant and articulate prose when all they have been trained to do is predict the next word or token in a sequence—albeit in a highly constrained algorithmic way. Perhaps auto-complete is cleverer than we thought, or maybe our ability to string words together into sentences is just another form of auto-complete.
However we measure up in this new digital age, an area of human accomplishment that appears to be beyond the reach of the current AI revolution is wine tasting. But will this always be the case? Would we bet on it? The odds are shortening, and we cannot rule out advances in automated systems having a significant impact on the world of wine. At the same time, we need to be wary of the hype surrounding this second wave of AI. Therefore, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are and what might be coming.
To review the current state of play, we need to be as clear as we can about definitions and avoid applying the term AI to every kind of digital technology. Not every app or algorithm is powered by artificial intelligence. Some merely aggregate data and are incapable of generating new insights or of improving decision-making. By contrast, AI systems go well beyond the big datasets on which they are trained, finding patterns in that data by means of machine-learning algorithms that learn from examples. These patterns enable the system to extend its application to novel cases, allowing it to model things like the underlying structure of folk songs, the likelihood of prisoners re-offending, or a consumer’s creditworthiness. In these and other cases, artificial intelligence is about digitally creating, in software tools or robots guided by software, capacities we thought only humans were capable of exercising. AI is not always limited, however, to modeling aspects of the human world. It can also be used to create large statistical models for predicting the course of a disease or improving long-range weather forecasting. The latter can be useful to winemakers and is already playing a peripheral, though important, role in viticulture, as part of AI’s wider contribution to agriculture: from satellite field and soil inspection, to plant health and fruit-picking decisions, to sorting and grading.
The more fundamental concern, however, is whether AI will ever be able to replicate human involvement in wine—a person’s expertise in tasting and appreciating a wine, their identification of the vintage or maker. Could a well-trained AI system end up exceeding the competence of wine professionals who make, select, and write about wines?
VR wine experiences?
There’s reason to be doubtful when it comes to wine tasting. The act of tasting involves smell, taste, and touch—three senses missing from the lives we live online. Tech entrepreneurs are wont to promote the fantasy that since we spend so much of our time in front of screens, we will one day be able to create an entirely digital record of our lives in files uploaded to the cloud. Will we, though? We would do well to remember that the recorded chapters, like the worlds we vicariously inhabit at the cinema, will consist entirely of sound and vision. These are worlds devoid of smell and taste we can experience. We are more likely to smell the popcorn of our fellow cinemagoers than anything we see on the big screen. Touch is occasionally added to digital devices, felt in the vibration of your cell phone; and while the fake shutter sound of your phone’s camera app gives you confidence that the shot has been taken, little else of the physicality of photography is incorporated.
It is instructive to note how contributions from the chemical senses go missing as we try to imagine every aspect of our lives being preserved online. This reveals just how neglected these senses are in everyday experience and how we have become hostages to our screens. That’s why each occasion when we step away from our screens to taste a wine and focus on the elusive nature of the precious liquid in the glass—its heady aromas, velvety texture, and persistent finish—provides an act of liberation, a blissful reminder of our embodied natures. These moments recruit us to what artist Olafur Eliasson calls the counter-numbness movement.
Could this outlook be too pessimistic? Is the absence of bodily senses from the digital landscape a mere technical limitation? Data fundamentalists and techno-optimists believe it is, firmly convinced as they are that vastly bigger datasets and more powerful algorithms will enable us to breeze through these limitations. The philosopher David Chalmers, in his recent book Reality +, is convinced. Virtual reality, he says, will eventually fill out these missing dimensions because “the physics engines that underpin VR” will continue to improve so that we will figure out how to handle the other senses. Chalmers believes that “like physical reality, VR […] can be a full-blooded environment for living a genuine life [… with] room for the full range of […] human [experiences].”1 He predicts that “within a century we will have [fully immersive] virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the non-virtual world.”
Chalmers and others are betting on advances in technology. But might there be reasons in principle to doubt there will be virtual wine tasting? I think there are. An experience of tasting requires us to put real liquids in real mouths, just as smelling requires putting real odorants up real noses. You might bolt on a delivery device to the VR headset that puffs wine aromas to the nose and squirts drops of liquid onto the tongue, but this still requires real odorants and liquids contacting real noses and tongues. Why go to the trouble of orchestrating real sensory experiences like these with what we see and hear via the headset when we could just give people a glass of wine? One reason we do not work and socialize more with each other’s avatars in the Metaverse is because these virtual meetings will contain no coffee and biscuits, no apéro at the end of the day.
Perhaps this is an unfair challenge. After all, we use our eyes to perceive the virtual bottles and glasses on the virtual table. Yet there is a crucial difference with smell and taste. For a virtual table to appear real, there must be a computer-generated image that causes you to see a table as you walk around it. And for there to be virtual aromas coming from the virtual glass, there would have to be a computer-generated entity causing you to smell it. But what sense could we make of a computer-generated aroma? Would a digitally created rose smell as sweet? For life’s most cherished experiences, what can’t be captured digitally will always remain essential.
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