Evolution proves that algorithms can solve any problem: Difference between revisions

}}You will see much scepticism in these pages that the claims habitually advanced in the cause of [[artificial intelligence]] are all they crack up to be. This is not just predicated on the quality of [[LinkedIn]]’s [[AI]]-generated question prompts — though they are certainly articulate evidence for the defence. ''Happy work-iversary!''

We say that [[algorithm]]ic processes — even clever ones — are simply ''incapable'' of responding to unexpected events in [[complex system]]s. Crisis management requires imagination, creativity, and the ability to quickly construct a [[narrative]] — qualities not possessed by any [[artificial intelligence]] known to the world today. Expecting preconfigured [[algorithm]]s to solve novel problems is like expecting Newtonian mechanics to explain the very events which, by their existence, [[falsify]] Newtonian mechanics. One needs to construct an entirely new model.

Here the prosecution appeals to {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}: it was [[evolution by natural selection]], after all, and ''only'' [[evolution by natural selection|evolution]] that operated relentlessly for 370 million years, from when the first legged fish crawled out of the primordial ooze and onto the shores of a new, terrestrial world. That single [[algorithm]] transformed those little flippy-finned mudsuckers into the highest type of sentient being yet known in this neighbourhood of the Galaxy: the [[ISDA ninja]]. And, to the best of our current thinking, all an [[ISDA ninja]] is doing is using her brain, and that is purely [[algorithm|algorithmic]], we see that human natural intelligence ''is'' an algorithmic process, ''created out of'' an algorithmic process.  

It is not that algorithms ''cannot'' in principle generate general intelligence — though the “[[Darwin’s dangerous idea]]” arguments ''are'' a bit hand-wavy — but that the particular ones you find in [[artificial intelligence]] as it is currently developing — and, no, it isn’t “evolving”, which is kind of the point — ''won’t''. Not just ''any'' [[algorithm]] is capable of self-awareness — a good thing, or you would spend more time in meaningful communication with your carrot cake than is necessarily healthy. They are a special kind of algorithm. Some folks have some ideas about what their special qualities may be ({{author|Douglas Hofstadter}} thinks the key may be [[Reflexive proposition|recursivity]]).<ref>{{br|I am a Strange Loop}}.</ref>

Accepting for a moment that the [[evolution by natural selection]] algorithm ''can'' generate intelligence, consider how staggeringly ''slow'', ''destructive'' and ''wasteful'' it is.

Hofstadter is at his best when when he addresses the reflexivity of human consciousness — the magic that emerges courtesy of the [[strange loop]] whereby the human perceives ''itself'' inside the universe it constructs, and where that working [[narrative]] must allow for, in order to explain, one’s own causal impact on the universe. This sets off an infinite loop which creates magical artifacts all by itself.

Machines are more like {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}}’s sentinels, watching dissociatively. They purport to describe the world as it is without affecting it: they monitor, measure, observe, process and give back but not to themselves, and not for themselves. To do that would be to colour their observations about human interaction, which would be to defeat their commercial purpose. Machines were developed to execute operations, quickly, without error. There is no room for error, judgment, variation or interpretation. Machines are designed ''not'' to narratise. They process symbols in mechanical operations. They do not read.

{{Author|Kazuo Ishiguro}}’s {{br|Klara and the Sun}}, which I happened to read straight after {{br|The Wood Age}}, makes the same point through the android’s unusual segmented spatial perception. It prompts the question: to what extent is consciousness a function of our own peculiar evolved perceptive apparatus? It seems to me it must be. When we design artificial intelligence with a blank slate, and especially if we come at it from a Behaviourist [[machine learning]] angle, which cannot have been the route to consciousness of human evolution, deprecating as it does the notion of an inner consciousness altogether, we would make different design choices, arrive at functional intelligence different way and these might lead to profoundly shifted articulations of ”consciousness”, if indeed any kind of consciousness emerges at all.