You keep on hearing about AI is bad and once AGI is around, it will kill us off – paperclip maximization principle is a telling example? Check the below tidbits pushing the envelop.
Music
Historically, people line up to attend concerts of famous artists. Now, there is AI that generates pure gold jazz or what sounds like a mix of jazz and classic. Would you line up to hear these pieces? Would you still line up if you didn’t know whether it’s an algorithm or a human?
Fiction
Do you like Harry Potter? What about this Harry Potter? This algorithm learnt from the first few chapters of J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter and created a novel of its own. Forget about J.K.Rowling, move on.
Film
TV series are great. Here is a script of Silicon Valley, generated by AI. Or a credibly-looking video from few dozen words (and some prior video training). Hollywood took heed.
Human behaviour
MIT researches created their AI system, which predicts human behaviour by approximating human “intuition” from myriads of data, and pitted it against human teams at data science competitions. The algorithm didn’t get the top score but it beat 615 of the 906 human teams competing. In two of the competitions, it created models that were 94% and 96% as accurate as the winning teams. Whereas the teams of humans required months to build their prediction algorithms, this algorithm trained 2-12 hours.
Cannibalism
Once virtual Adam and Eve (AI bots) were done with apples, they ate Stan, an innocent bystander (another AI bot) that happened to look like an apple.
Formula of life
OK, all the above are creepy, cool, scary, depending on your knowledge, interest and approach to life. But could these AI concepts eventually yield or create actual or natural life forms?
Even Artificial Life community acknowledges that the definition of “life” is contentious.
What Darwin’s theory talks about and what we believe is that there is clear difference between living organisms (in how they come to be and evolve) and everything else (from water vortexes to AI systems to coastal lines of England). Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, big bang and a colossal stroke of luck for creation of of life. Erwin Schrödinger framed life merely as physical processes in his treatise “What is Life?”.
But till now we had hard time explaining how (open) thermodynamic systems like our universe and even Earth evolved and how lifeforms evolved in them. We have answers for (close and weak open) ones. Till now.
According to Jeremy England from MIT given it a thermodynamic framing: it’s all about entropy (to create life, one has to decrease entropy). Carbon is not God. In his view, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate chunks of carbon atoms: the former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. He has math formula, which indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun) and surrounded by heat (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This implies that under certain conditions, matter may acquire key physical attribute associated with life.
Now back to AI craze above. Imagine if we could introduce systems that artificially decrease entropy in AI systems as per Jeremy England’s prescriptions, near future could see a new Cambrian explosion of artificially constructed forms of life, which are….. songs, movies, fiction, ….. and perhaps new and better beings!
Here are more creepy/cool AI applications or here. Enjoy!
P.S. Ralph Merkle think of Bitcoin as life:
Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. … It can’t be stopped. It can’t even be interrupted. If nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live, uncorrupted.