Ever since Charles Babbage invented Babbage's Difference Engine Number 1, the first device ever devised that could calculate and print mathematical tables, humankind has speculated on the limit of their potential. However, his friend and mathematician Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who was credited as the first computer coder, was underwhelmed by his early machine.
Ada considered Babbage's invention boring and envisaged what else computers might do in the future. With great foresight, this included playing music, making art and writing. She came up with a test, known as the Lovelace Test, which said that only when computers originate things should they be believed to have minds.
Alan Turing followed up the Lovelace Test with the Turing Test, a simple test to demonstrate whether a computer could demonstrate human intelligence.
Back in the 1990’s one of the key moments in the evolution of computer intelligence was the battle between grandmaster Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue. Kasparov was beaten. Today, with the application of deep learning, computers can learn to do what Deep Blue did in a fraction of the time. However, big challenges remain.
The game of Go was a huge challenge, being a game in which intuition plays such a large part. AlphaGo was built by DeepMind (later acquired by Google) to take on the challenge. In 2016 it took on Go genius Lee Se-dol in a five-match series.
Already one game up it was the 37th move of the second game that was in all senses of the word a game-changer. AlphaGo made a move that the experts thought was a mistake, breaking the basic rules of the game. The computer, however, went on to win (ultimately taking the series 4-1).
So unusual and unconventional was the move that it forever changed the perception of how Go could be played. Witnessing the match was journalist Sam Byford who wrote: “I’ve spent a lot of time throughout this series with people who’ve made Go their life’s work; it was a deeply moving experience to sit among them and hear their stunned gasps as a computer subverted everything they thought they knew about their passion.” AlphaGo had achieved a level of mastery that exceeded the best.
However, the lesson here was not just that AlphaGo, like Deep Blue before it, had become better than the best at a particular task. AlphaGo had made a move that met Lovelace’s test. In doing so it revealed a new and important role, showing us how AI can usefully disrupt our preconceptions and shift our creative horizon.
Clearing the Fog
Imagine climbing a mountain in the fog, but because of the poor visibility, you think you’ve reached the highest point before you have. AI can clear the fog freeing you to see that you can climb further.
What blinds us is the fog of familiarity, the inability to come to a situation spontaneously and be free from our history with it.
Our intellect binds us to what we already know. Change is perceived as dangerous, so our default position is to do things as closely to the way we’ve done them before – particularly when we’ve been successful in the past. AI now offers us the tantalizing option of a collaboration where new possibilities can be tried out and our way of looking at problems can be dramatically shaken up. With that comes the potential for new solutions.
From AI to BI
The strange thing is though that we’ve had this potential for objective innovation within us all along. It’s called the body. Within every one of us is a body intelligence (BI) that can give us fresh perspectives that are not bound by our intellectual rigidness. It is not limited by the comfort zones of the intellect; it is not framed by the same horizons.
Our intellect innovates by reference to what has gone before, making connections with the already known. Our bodies however work by accessing what Buddhists call ‘Nature's Memory’, what Carl Jung called ‘The Collective Unconscious’ which is spontaneous.
By adding to our existing skills with different approaches, we can better break free from what constrains us.
Comentários