Creepy or cool? some AI breakthroughs and formula of life

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.

story of a farmer and surprises of life

One day a farmer’s horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, neighbors came to visit. “Bad luck,” they sympathized.

“We’ll see,” he replied. Next morning the horse returned, bringing three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” neighbors exclaimed.

“We’ll see.” Following day, his son rode one of untamed horses, was thrown and broke his leg. Neighbors again came to offer their sympathy.

“We’ll see.” Next day, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. Neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things turned out.

“We’ll see.”

awake and alive

Wakefulness is the way to life.
The fool sleeps as if he were already dead,
but the master is awake and he lives forever.
He watches. He is clear.
How happy he is! For he sees that wakefulness is life.
How happy he is, following the path of the awakened.
With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.
  
from the Dhammapada of Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha)

future of human life and biomimicry

4.5 billion years of evolution taught nature what works and what lasts.

We’ve been increasingly distancing ourselves from nature: agricultural revolution – grow stock and abandon hunting/gathering; scientific revolution – “torture nature for her secrets;” industrial revolution – machines replace muscles.

Biomimicry is the study of nature for solutions to our problems. Having 96% of our bodies built upon carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, nature can teach us how to:

  • use only the energy needed
  • fit form to function
  • recycle everything
  • curb excesses from within
  • tap the power of limits
  • devise systems that can face unknown situations
  • update ourselves by feedback loops

is dalai lama a dictator?

What you might not know is that Dalai Lama is considered a “religious dictator” (against his “competitor” Dorje Shugden‘s worshippers) by some.

In the West, he is mostly beloved/admired for his intense charism and Hollywood connections, projecting an image of an avuncular “Santa Claus.” Western fans see in him a “secular saint” or a “politically correct god for a godless world”.

Furthermore, admiration for Dalai Lama taps into older Western ideas about Tibet (forbidden to Westerners during 1792-1903 period) as a remote and mystical Shangri-La.

Sleep is the best way to meditate according to Dalai Lama.

soul food (chapter 2 of tao te ching – translated by ursula le guin)

Everybody on earth knowing
that beauty is beautiful
makes ugliness.
 
Everybody knowing
that goodness is good
makes wickedness.
 
For being and nonbeing
arise together;
hard and easy
complete each other;
long and short
shape each other;
note and voice
make the music together;
before and after
follow each other.
 
That’s why the wise soul
does without doing,
teaches without talking.
The things of this world
exist, they are;
you can’t refuse them.
 
To bear and not to own;
to act and not lay claim;
to do the work and let it go:
for just letting it go
is what makes it stay.
 

music, life and pan

Did you know that music can teach about life and history?

A native of Trinidad and Tobago, pan, was originally used for communication between enslaved Africans during the British colonial rule and acquired its modern form in the guise of used oil barrels made of steel.

To quote from the launching event of Pan Camp 2011 (during which participants were also taught spirituality and conflict management)

…learning pan… develops qualities of persistence and consistency… for achieving anything in life that is worthwhile.

P.S.  Steel-pans are the only instruments in the world that follow the musical cycle of fourths-and-fifths calculated by Pythagoras.

life, gamification and emergence

What is life? Life is a game, emergent on simple rules – humans cannot pretend to know even a tiny part of those rules. But games are the best way to learn about general and specific aspects of life such as business, politics, music

Watched Matrix? Played Matrix Online?

But why do we play games? Fun (easy/hard), different mental/intellectual states and people. In a word: a richer emotional/mental/social set of experiences our lives rarely grant us.

Games reflect complexity aspects of life. No better game than chess for us to learn more about life.