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| "Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decibel, hurricane, dolphin, tulip" |
Watched Spielberg’s masterpiece: Artificial Intelligence: A.I., yesterday evening. i use the word 'masterpiece' not in the sense a film critic would use, rather a viewer deeply affected by the movie would use to imply. By the way, it's also a first for me to use that word to describe my experience of a movie; no Spielberg movie had yet affected me as much… On a rather lesser level, it also reminded me of the movie 'Rani Aur Lalpari', involving an almost similar desire of a girl to find Lal pari (Red fairy), that i had so loved as a child (but, was bored of it when i tried to gavi it a re-watch a few months ago; beginning of the end of innocence?)...
i had discovered earlier about myself, i think, i am easily most affected (positively) by innocence, and love, not necessarily in that order. i didn't have an inkling as to which of them affected me the most, i had given the benefit of doubt to love. However, after this movie, i am having second thoughts on that, in favour of innocence...
Post-watch, i was left with such a pacific, meditative peace and calm with myself, and at the same time in such an awe of the 'innocence' and the sage like 'perseverance’ of the mecha boy: David (does this name imply any Biblical significance?), that i still have that tranquil hangover this next evening too…
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| "Blue fairy! Please make me a 'real' boy!" |
That apart, it also did lead me to some instant random questions, representing and arising out of my current unorganised state of thoughts on this issue of natural v/s artificial life, i need find answers to, to enable me make more sense of the issue. So here some of the basic ones go:
- How do we scientifically define ‘life’ and/or 'intelligence' (as opposed to finding such definitions rooted in religion and theology)?
- What are the necessary and sufficient conditions to define and characterise life and/or intelligence?
- 'Artificial' just an innocent prefix indicative only of the creator of life or intelligence (nature or humans and/or machines), or does it imply more?
Answers to these below mentioned ones can probably be found in answers to the above questions:
- Any system then takes an input, has the power & resources to processes it, and reacts to the input (to give an output) be called an elementary form of life and/or intelligence (a crude example being any simple computer program)?
- While attempting a simulation of life, at what point the simulation ceases to be one, and becomes an artificially created life?
- An amoeba be called an instance of life, while even a super toy from A.I. not?
Obviously, as it can be seen, many of these questions wouldn't have been there in the first place, had i had the least bit exposure to studying artificial intelligence in pursuit of my curiosity. However, i do hope to make a start...
P.S.
Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny (an advanced robot): Can you?
(I, Robot)
I was extremely affected by the movie. This was supposed to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. But he didn't live to do that and left the task for Spielberg. I believe Spielberg did a fantastic job, but I can not help but imagine how Kubrick would have treated the same script.
ReplyDeleteYou have raised some interesting questions here. I would try to answer one of them, to some extent.
Q: What is the definition of Intelligence?
A: (I went through various definitions and this one seems the most precise and satisfactory):
Intelligence is a being's
- capacity TO LEARN new skills,
- capacity TO APPLY the skills he/she/it has already learnt, and
- capacity to indulge in ABSTRACT THINKING.
Think about this definition. I find it amazingly accurate.
the coincidence of it: i was browsing through older entries of your blog just now, and this post fell in my lap: Greatest Directors in Cinema History: #10 Stanley Kubrick (US-UK, 1928-1999)!!! incidentally, came to know about him today itself, while browsing through the trivia section of A.I. on imdb. i have not yet read your post though. will read it after watching his best works as mentioned there by you, to avoid any bias i may acquire after reading them.
ReplyDeletesometimes envy you, the way you experience such a range of varied emotions and encounter different thoughts, and allow yourself to be willingly affected by them by way of indulging in a broad spectrum of the best of cinema (this thought came by as i was browsing through your older blog entries)
coming back to A.I., i have't seen you drop the words 'extremely affected' for a movie even in your blog earlier. coming from you, these are strong expressions, so i guess i will take your word for it.
your suggested definition/characteristics of intelligence stand(s), but how about defining life, and also intelligent life, as simply defining intelligence leads us only a little further. the situation becomes tricky once we casually start implying intelligent life, from the above mentioned definition of intelligence. on first thoughts, while most other animals (apart from us, i mean to say) would pass the 1st and 2nd criteria, i don't know if it is technologically yet possible to ascertain if they can pass the 3rd criteria! And, in absence of any suggestive evidence, what scientific (and thus, also unbiased) stance do we take towards them, in way of categorizing them as being intelligent life or not! the similar middle-stance science has towards existence of a god: can't deny, yet can't certify too? the situation is a bit frightening and unnerving, to simply declare our species as the only ascertained species on the planet displaying intelligence, while all these times, the other species may be laughing at our myopia at failing to see the wonder of intelligent life in them!
so, do we branch out intelligent life and unintelligent life as different subcategories of life, or may be we reevaluate precise definitions/ distinction (if they exist) between 'life', and 'intelligent life'? you have studied medical science, and may have scrutinized life more closely from scientific point of view, so it will be interesting to know your views!
p.s. i added another papa (the 3rd one), after you already had read the post.
i have an interesting trivia for you, on A.I., Haley Joel, the actor playing David suggested to Spielberg that his character should not blink!
ReplyDeletebrilliant insight into character, coming from a 13 year old boy (age at the time of filming)!
And Spielberg took that advice to apply to all other androids as well...
I missed earlier acknowledging the plant life!
ReplyDeleteAre they considered intelligent?
Arrived at a the necessary characteristic for life:
- life should be able to create life!
What do you think of that, because the characteristic isn't yet foolproof, as then how do we call persons born (hypothetically) with sexual dysfunctional of never being able to reproduce?
Interestingly, failed to find meaning for "intelligent life" phrase in wikipedia! the closest it come to is defining an "intelligent agent" (implying machine, as opposed to life) as a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success!
ReplyDeleteLet me elaborate on the definition of Intelligence I gave earlier:
ReplyDeleteIt is a being's capacity to do the three things mentioned there. If a being can not indulge in abstract thinking, that does not mean it is not intelligent at all. But it is definitely less intelligent than someone who is equal to it in the first two categories but can also indulge in a little bit of abstraction. So, this definition applies to all species, and also establishes man as the most intelligent species by the virtue of the third parameter.
Also, I believe every species does involve in some level of abstract thinking. If everything were set and followed, evolution would have suffered. I believe organisms gain survival instincts by intuitive thinking apart from learning established survival instincts. There has to be some 'right brain' abstraction to help them survive better and thus enabling the natural selection to take place.
Moreover, everything has evolved from something. Nature has foreshadowed our traits in earlier species. So, abstract thinking must have got its roots somewhere in the earliest of life forms.
Again, to emphasize, this definition does not rule out amoeba as unintelligent, just lesser so because of its diminished capacity of abstract thinking.
The definition of a 'living being' is again interesting. I am thinking of our primary school days. Remember we used to learn something (mentioned below) that we can use to define life:
ReplyDeleteLiving beings need food.
Living beings grow.
Living beings respond to stimuli.
Living beings reproduce. etc.
Any 'living being' unable to fulfill a certain criteria would just be an exception. For example, a person might lose his perception of senses and thus might stop responding to stimuli (e.g. someone in coma). That does not mean he is dead. Also, technically speaking, a person who is sexually compromised is not totally incapable to reproduce. Even one cell from his body contains the blueprint of an entire organism. It just needs to undergo a certain procedure (read 'cloning'). So I think the biggest criteria of 'life is life if it can recreate life' is true and universal.
On a different note, even plants are intelligent. All living beings are. But their level of intelligence varies. You can apply the definition of intelligence to plants as well.
But let me add something that would take this discussion to a different level altogether, a level so vast, confusing and abstract that we would be intimidated.
ReplyDeleteDuring my Medicine days I felt that everything in this world, including psycho-social behaviour of humans can be described by the laws of the living world, that is the biosphere. In short, Nature's laws can explain everything.
Then I read a book by Mani Bhowmik, physicist. And realized how wrong I was. Our biosphere is too insignificant to answer 'everything'. But by the time I ended the book, I was glad again. My earlier belief was not nullified, just modified. Nature's laws can answer everything. But Nature is not just biosphere. It is the entire universe - the entire space-time continuum, the interplay of mass and energy.
In that sense, we should not distinguish between living and non-living. They are just forms of energy. In fact your blog has forced me to think whether the next species (after Homo sapiens) is the AI. It does not matter whether it is living or not. What matters is that it has appeared at the justified time in the evolutionary timeline.
In short, everything acquires a different perspective when we look things not only in terms of biology, but in the terms of modern physics, which I believe is the most evolved form of science, closer to the 'Truth' than anything else.
Wow, you really have given me a lot to sleep on. Give me some time to process :)
ReplyDeleteQuite a discussion !! And I can not help but chip in with my half-baked understanding of 'Intelligence' :)
ReplyDelete'Artificial Intelligence' was a term coined by the early engineers working on machines to do tasks beyond the computational ability of human mind. Then the term took a generic direction and covers a really wide spectrum now.
But I have never been comfortable or totally convinced with the tag of 'Artificial' attached to some forms of intelligence . This always predicated the need of a 'Natural' form of intelligence , atleast in my thought process .
One of the first assignments in our AI paper was the 'Monkey-Banana problem' .In brief , this problem was about a mechanical monkey sitting in a room without any walls or doors and a banana hanging in the center of the room .There was a chair positioned somewhere in the room and we had to program the monkey to make it take the right decision of using the chair to climb up and pluck the hanging banana( and eat it of course).
The expected way to tackle this problem was to figure in all the computational probabilities and then eliminate the choices which did not lead the monkey to the banana. But I was uncomfortable with this because we were substituting 'understanding' with a large degree of computation whereas I firmly believe that 'understanding' forms the backbone of any intelligent process , at any level.
We human beings,as the foremost intelligent speices ,don't start looking for all the wrong answers to eliminate when an inteligent decision is to be made( or maybe our brain indeed does??) and I failed to see reason in doing so with machines.
Coming back to the original discussion , imparting 'artificial' intelligence implied the presence of some form of 'natural' intelligence in the system . By what I recall (and Satya should correct me if I am mistaken), the first intelligent life form on earth came from the ocean water and the rest of them followed thanks to evolution. In light of this , the need to tag intelligent forms as 'natural' or 'artificial' loses relevance because of the very fact that the presumably natural ones were a probable result of some fortuitous bio-chemical coincidence and evolution.
All this and I have not even touched upon the Physics angle as suggested by Satya in the mass-energy,space-time continuum . When the sheer dimension and dynamics of the universe is factored in , the idea of intelligence loses the solid grounding of some basic tenets. Quantum physics opened a pandora's box when it suggested time as a dimension and forced us to revisit all the pre-set notions of considering mass, energy , space or time in isolation.
Intelligence is self-sustaining and the idea to separate 'Life' and 'Intelligence' is not as weird as it sounds .
am still processing the inputs given by both of you, and thank you both for that... what i intended to do via this post was to express some ground level questions about an interesting issue that was affecting me, and aroused that curiosity in you all too, get some starting material from you all as a base to build up on, and then try indulging in it at a more deeper level, and again summarize the thoughts and findings in form of a post, open again to you people for scrutiny. meanwhile just dropping by some pointers...
ReplyDeleteSatya, you are may just be so right in pointing out that looking for life in terms of biology may just be myopic. I dare say this current view of defining life may just be rendered outdated at some time in future, to encompass and recognize more forms of life (A.I.?). I guess, when people had first begun to define life, biological life must have been the obvious parameter for judgment of life for them. as Atul was pointing out, A.I. didn't mean what it means today, when it was first conceived, and so, those defining life, obviously couldn't have thought about this parameter, while they decided to define and characterize life...
Now, 'Artificial Intelligence' as a term coined by the early engineers working on machines to do tasks beyond the computational ability of human mind, and then gradually evolving as a definition to become more generic in nature... in a leap of my imagination (may be flawed), i dare say at some later point in future, the definitions of 'life' and 'A.I.' might just become synonymous and the same!!!
it all depends on what we mean of the prefix 'Artificial'. about your discomfort with this tag, Atul, suggesting the need of a 'natural' intelligence as a prerequisite, i agree, because, interestingly, looking at this from the origin of life perspective, didn't this whole biological (natural) life process start from inanimate scratch, from which 'life' now vehemently tries to distance itself as its completely opposite! wow!
'inanimate' gives birth to the 'animate' and then again, the 'animate' tries to simulate and model itself in the 'inanimate', and after a point the simulation ceases to be one, and the 'inanimate' becomes the 'animate' again!!! seems we are unavoidably heading towards that higher generalizing truth about the interplay of mass-energy, when the differences between living and non-living cease to exist!!!
aah... need a moment here to pause and let it all sink in, lest there be a flaw in the logic...
now, about 'life begets life' from class 6 lessons of Pandey da :), and agreed to here as the most important condition for life, a computer program can also give birth to (create) another computer program (Atul, correct me here!)... now here comes that evil smile on my face...
no, am not jumping on any quick conclusions here. will scrutinize all this more tightly and closely, but before that, need to augment the knowledge base at my disposal...
About "intelligence is self-sustaining and the idea to separate 'Life' and 'Intelligence' is not as weird as it sounds"
ReplyDeletewow! had never come to think that they may be separated!!!
in fact, this proposition will find a vehement backing in the ancient vedic philosophy, as it suddenly dawned upon me. god, is not a form of life! god is that self-sustaining intelligence, as opposed to a form of life, and hence doesn't take birth & dies ('assuming' that god exists)!!! wow!
this thought of intelligence as self-sustaining entity, independent from life, is such a fun & treat to think upon!
p.s. i might have misinterpreted my vedic philosophy analogy above, as a quick background check reveals.
ReplyDeletethe advaita God is niraakaar and nirgun, and does not possess any characteristic (even intelligence is a characteristic) what so ever. hard to perceive of such an entity, but the analogy goes like, that God is indescribable by us, just as a blind man cannot describe the colorful world. it is said He is not even a form of energy! so him possessing any form (matter-energy) and intelligence is ruled out.
moving on, the saakaar god, as a form of a self-sustaining intelligent entity i was trying to find analogy in, possesses the sat-chid-anand qualities, is obviously intelligent, and has a form (matter-energy), but is not to posses this biological 'life'...
anyway, i only know about the vedic philosophy from its fringes, and so assuming that my analogy is without flaw, will obviously be quite foolish...
but what a road! starting from the currently defined A.I., a journey to supposedly the very source, to the niraakaar god! something indeed!
may be an inkling of the tremendous length and breadth of knowledge, this issue contains and plans to unveil in future...
The moment this discussion started, I believed it will lead to the concept of 'God'. I purposefully stayed away from it, but see, it still appeared!
ReplyDeleteI stayed away from it because during the past one year I have developed a theory (it is mostly ideas taken from various sources) that dares to explain life, evolution, God, etc. in the most convincing way.
Life, evolution, God, etc.... does not it mean everything that exists. In fact I call this theory 'The Natural Theory of Everything'. Have had night-long discussions with friends on this. I believe that it does explain everything, including our raison d'etre, as individuals, as species.
In fact everything being discussed here can be explained through that theory. I am thinking of starting a blog on that. It is worth spending a life time on that. But I don't have enough time presently to do something like that. If we meet, would definitely talk about that.
It is scary to talk about these things here, because it is such a vast topic and demands so much of time that I am scared at bringing up more detailed views.
yes, it will be a delight to talk over the issue when we meet :)
ReplyDeleteinterestingly, when we were first presented the concept of life, academically in classroom, it seemed like such a taken for granted thing at that age, didn't really realize the mysterious and untamed nature of this issue then...
about that blog on this issue, once you present it in a hypothesis form in the wide open web, it may even go out of your control at times, such is the very nature of the issue being dealt with, with different philosophies trying to scrutinize, tear apart and test the theory put forward (the virtual environment)... the issue is bound to take a life of its own there, literally, surviving and constantly evolving to survive, to staying tentative, while at the same time becoming more precise, self-consistent, and comprehensive! so do initiate that theory by giving it a virtual life of its own :)
about the belief of physics being the most evolved form of science, closer to the 'Truth' than anything else, i will supply here an interesting piece of information to savour.
ReplyDeletein 'The Scientific Outlook', an early classic on science, Russell states, "...it is the theoretical goal of every science to be absorbed in physics..." ;)
and about that scary feeling you mentioned, i guess that's (apart from the fear of making a fool of oneself to the world) a natural outcome of a result of a free thinking analysis of an issue, when one comes to a conclusion, that is esp. either strongly non-conformist or falls in domain of taboo, esp. in an intolerant society where we have grown, which by and large considers free thinking as an ideal best represented on a pieces of paper and and best practiced in corridors of colleges & schools only, while adopting a systemic persecution and repression as a potent weapon to shun it, whenever the outcomes of that thinking sets to challenge its very firmly set ideals and beliefs... but am glad, our society is gradually evolving and changing, to catch up with the rest of the world on that... 'gradual' is the operating parameter here...
ReplyDeletein fact, i have a separate private blog, just like a 'pensive', where due to this very fear (and that of making myself a fool), behind the veils of my privacy, i pour all my such 'offensive' and weird ideas into, and relieve my mind from an unnecessary burden of finding ways of their expression... ;)
But my fear has nothing to do with the either of two:
ReplyDelete1. I have no problem if I end up making myself a fool, because I am confident that not many are learning at the rate I am. So, my being a fool presently does not matter.
2. Also, I am not afraid of talking about things that are in the domain of taboo.
I was afraid of raising this issue because it will take a lot of my time. And presently I am just too busy. :)
ha ha, was not specifically commenting on you, rather generalizing.
ReplyDeletepersonally, at some level i need to shed that fear of making myself a fool. but really fear dealing with taboos publicly for a fear of backlash from society... anyway hope to overcome...