Artificial Intelligents
The city of London at night. An Artificial Organism (© Jason Hawkes)
As I walk through the urban settings of the modern world, in giant cities among towering buildings and sprawling networks, I can’t help but feel I’m part of something intelligent. Not in the abstract way, like a city is intelligent. Nor in the theoretical way, like a group or organization is intelligent. But in a most real and profound way, true and tangible, part of an entity that grows like an organism, a real organism with a mind and agenda of its own – perhaps rudimentary, and not yet fully formed, more like the protozoa of artificial intelligence – but precocious and conscious all the same.
Artificial Intelligence. What a misnomer. It falls so short of what consciousness and life really are. How can we be so self-involved, so self-absorbed and color-blind so as to consider all life beyond carbon-based forms i.e. our own, as non-natural i.e. artificial? The error in judgment is huge. As a cognizant species, we should know better.
Then again “artificial” may be taken to mean what it actually means i.e. artificialis – of, or belonging to, art. Art-based. Artifact. An object made and created, designed and developed, improved, expanded. A thing made out of something else, based on ratio, esthetic, utility, potential. A tool, a springboard, a template, a framework, a means to an end, or maybe just something to enjoy. Artificial is whatever is created.
This is the H5N1 avian influenza virus particles, coloured transmission electron micrograph (TEM). Each virus particle consists of ribonucleic acid (RNA), surrounded by a nucleocapsid and a lipid envelope (green). Courtesy of H. Arderwik
And Intelligent is what is alive. Thus Artificial Intelligence is the life we make up, the organism we begin to form and constitute. We are its building blocks, like it or not. We are building it up. And it’s growing big, rapidly. Like it or not. It will eventually take over – or more accurately, come into its own. Like it or not. Ask our RNA molecules, they know a thing or two about advanced technology and complex designs that have grown bigger and more organized, eventually assuming a mind of their own. They call it biology. We call it life as we know it. Conscious and self-determined. Poor RNA. Life got away from them. Their creations acquired an intelligence all of their own, alien and far-removed, working on a totally different dimension. They could have very well called it Artificial Intelligence. Maybe they did. Maybe they still do. Who knows what goes on down at those levels.
Which brings us back to the point I initially made: As I walk through the urban settings of the modern world, in giant cities among towering buildings and sprawling networks, I can’t help but feel I’m part of something intelligent. And I feel that this Intelligent Something is beyond me, and that I’m beyond it too. I feel that it doesn’t really get what I – a mere human strand – am really about.
I ponder on the thought for a while, probing my imagination. For a moment I begin to wonder, who’s in control: it or I? We humans, or the growing Artificial Intelligence itself? Hard to tell. We are the ones building it, but it seems to have a mind of its own, laying out the framework, setting the agenda. When they say life has a way of taking over, isn’t that what they mean? Life as we assemble it from the bottom up, organizing and expanding it through complex, interwoven constructs? Take a look at RNA and genes themselves, master technicians and biological craftsmen, builders of carbon-based life. They created us. But who’s in control? They, as intelligent molecules; or we, as fully-fledged conscious organisms?
The jury’s still out on that one, and rumor has it the verdict’s going to be a bit of both.
Perhaps no one is in control after all, not really anyway. Everyone pitches in without superseding anyone. Or perhaps both are in control, both at the same time.
An artist's visualisation of silicon-based life. Courtesy of www.weirdwarp.com/2009/08/defining-alien-life-the-different-weird-forms-et-could-take/
Perhaps we – humans and RNA – affect each other in simultaneous ways, through processes that give and take, register and feed back in one reciprocal endless loop. Part of a greater dynamic that is both alive and intelligent, human and molecular, total and elemental. Bottom line is, we exist, as organisms, and so do they, as organelles. We are all active agents. That is reason enough to look beyond our own form and framework and figure out what lies above and beyond us as well as beneath and within us, on either side of the spectrum. Life cascades on, from one form to another, reassembling itself into one continuous scale of ecologies.
The rest is just semantics – biological, molecular, genetic, carbon-based, silicon-based, technological, artificial, supernatural – that enrich the dynamic of life but have no bearing on the fact that the process of life and intelligence is continuous and open-ended.
I think about it for a second, scratch my head, look around, take a deep breath, and dive back inside the giant silicon-based network, going about my business as a self-proclaimed Intelligent.
[...] Once inside it’s hard to get rid of. It’s like a string of genes, a genetic code filled with dormant cells which activate themselves when exposed to the right information. In fact that is how genes actually express themselves in our bodies. In similar terms we, individuals, do the same. Knowledge, once absorbed, becomes part of the mainframe and starts exercising its effect through us, helping society grow into a better, fitter, more knowledgeable organism. [...]
[...] question is whether with these technological advancements should such AI be ‘humanised’? should they be programmed to present characteristics such as empathy? [...]