Artificial Neural Networks are interesting, like many things, at a broad level only. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty of automata and models of computation the excitement soon drains out of it, I’ve always found. For the pop-scientists among us though, this article on the Creation Machine (found at The Nonist) is wonderful and creepy all at the same time.
Artificial intelligence is a pretty tired subject at this stage, but what is less frequently addressed is the creative potential of evolving computers. We are still a long way off having a robot serve you coffee but the point that we are reaching rather more quickly is a computer writing real, expressive music. And when you think about it, which is more significant? A robot to drive you to work or one that can create an emotionally resonant art-piece?
As a species, it’s our creativity that we always celebrate as our most positive innate ability. While we are warring and lying and cheating and stealing we can still always look at ourselves and say “But look at our creativity! Look at the vast, untarnished potential we carry inside each and every one of us. We are truly unique and miraculous!”
We like to think of our ability to imagine as something almost magical (or spiritual?). But take past experience (data), throw in a little noise along with a problem to work on, and that’s creativity. We may be complex, but there is nothing there that can’t be measured, weighed and formulated by a more complex system.
And now we have something like the Creativity Machine, which one day soon will be able to write a song indistinguishable from one written by a living, breathing human. To paint a painting, to sculpt materials. To create. And not just create new chemical formulae or mathematical solutions, but the create within those mediums that speak to our emotional core. Can you imagine what that will do to our collective psyche? We wanted smart robots for menial task-work, but creativity is the one thing that was supposed to be ours. Unfakable.
With intelligence comes all those other qualities of the mind that we take as ours, and that’s frightening. The machines don’t have to become our evil overlords for them to be able to seriously redefine the boundaries of what we consider human.
If in the (robot) future you get chatting with a gorgeous woman in a bar and you need to make sure she’s not a fembot tell her a joke….
Although my past experiences with joke telling would point at robot women existing in every corner of society already.
— James Sep 20, 08:57 AM #
(Also I consider any blow to our fetishization of ourselves to be a pretty welcomed thing.)
As for robots making honest to goodness masterpieces, I think as any artist will tell you it’s not the art itself which is important but rather the process of creating it. If the existence of masterpieces created by seemingly superhuman and exacting hands were enough to put us off of creating things for ourselves then we’d have stopped already, since a certain group of “exacting and seemingly superhuman” creators have already made the masterpieces that dog our psyches- the old masters.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that though I agree in large part that robots managing to “move” us through their creations will be challenging from an “identity” standpoint, I’m not sure in the long run it really matters. After-all, we created the robots to do exactly that didn’t we, perhaps we’ll just begin viewing them as our new, great, human masterpieces?
I don’t think any of us need quake in our existential boots until robots begin doing things they “were not” programmed and designed, by us, to do. When an assembly line robot designed to put rivets in car doors writes a sonata in it’s free time, then I’ll worry.
Good post Pierce.
— Jaime Morrison Sep 20, 02:04 PM #
Jaime- I tend to take an idea and narrowly follow it through to some conclusion. You are broadening things a little, which is a good thing.
I agree with you about human creativity being a quantifiable process (although possibly so complex as to be beyond our understanding; the system cannot be entirely aware of its own complexity).
But I don’t think understanding this on some intellectual level would distinguish the emotional response to the challenge of “creativity” coming from elsewhere.
Although, typing this, I realise that we are constantly moved by stimuli beyond our ken: nature, the stars, the weather. Most of us are still ascribing this to some bearded landlord, but even the most vigorously scientific among us are not unaffected by natural beauty.
Ack. I think the idea of artificial intelligence has been with us for so long that its representation in movies, etc has made us oversensitive to the negative possibilities. I suppose a robot designed to create is no more than a tool serving its purpose, at the end of the day.
— Pierce Sep 20, 08:20 PM #