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.