On Artificial Intelligence and Machine Men : Part Twelve

[ellyssian]

On Artificial Intelligence and Machine Men
By Everett A Warren
March 14, 2004

Presented as part twelve of sixteen

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Part One
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"Soldiers – don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you – who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder."

Our quoted speaker is neither military leader nor politician. He is speaking here to both sides – to that of a dictator's army, and to that of the people's army. Be cognisant of your actions. Do not allow yourself to be treated as disposable. Some will read that and think "Anarchy", by which a fraction will intend that to mean "Stuff Just Works" and others will mean "Trash Everything".

One can certainly argue that technology helps regiment our lives: as we further refine the ambiguous into a set process, it becomes so much more tempting to dictate exactly what form that should take, where the dot on the i goes, and where it shouldn't. Even those of us who live in apparent randomness have rituals and procedures, and they are unalterable – either in truth, or, at the least, in our minds. How much order do we force on the unordered?

In a graphic depiction by Neil Gaiman, Order was manifested as an empty cardboard box held by a servant who read the fortune-cookie like announcements that appeared in the box; Chaos, as a little girl who held a red balloon and sometimes made announcements of whatever came to her mind⁹. Man likes to pretend to be well ordered, logical, rational. Certainly, there is the desire to be seen as in control, not speaking whatever thought flitters into being, as a child might. There is entirely too much opposition to adults behaving Childlike – mostly because they don't understand, and confuse Childish with Childlike.

First off, let us remove both -like and -ish from the sole province of pre-mature adults. Children can lack both quantities, even as adults can possess both in spades. The borders can blur between the two – more on blurring lines in a bit – but there are key differences. Childish is best exemplified by the image of a spoiled brat, i.e. your co-worker who didn't get their way, the guy in the line at the bank who feels you're taking too much time and throws a fit, and the heads of state who pull out bigger and bigger guns as they accelerate from name-calling to all out brawling. Childlike is perhaps best seen in the Taoist master, or Winnie-the-Pooh (which are one and the same as Benjamin Hoff points out in "The Tao of Pooh"¹⁰), and entails a mix of several key points: the ability to adapt to a situation rather than adapting the situation to fit them, the ability to resolve problems in an open, loving, and creative manner, and the ability to smile, sing, and dance while doing so.

By the same notion that adults refuse to behave in a Childlike manner thinking it Childish, Order is supposed to be good and well, and Chaos is not.

There is a major misconception involved here, often tied to religion. Order is often brought about in reference to what God created, leaving Man to choose between Order and Chaos, which are forced into ill-fitting synonyms with Good and Evil. Without going into extensive detail, it should be pointed out that discoveries in fractal geometry¹¹ have shown that most things natural – what some would say is created by God – do not follow well ordered Euclidean geometry – indeed, the only true circles or squares or straight lines are those created by Mankind or by a great distance that blurs the details.¹²

If we fudge those details, we can state that the coast of Massachusetts is x miles long. However, if we look closer, we dip into this bay here, that peninsula there, and the coast gets longer. Then we follow some further indistinct lines, tracing into some marshy areas and rivers and so forth, and the number gets larger. After any number of iterations, we have a coast significantly longer than our ballpark satellite image. At some point, we're left with grains of sand, and if we start measuring the surface of each one, the coast begins approaching an infinite length.

This fractal geometry has been termed "Chaos", and given rise to "Chaos Science" (so inappropriately reduced to "Man as God" in Jurassic Park, as discussed earlier), and gives us a geometry to describe shapes such as trees and rivers and lungs and jellyfish and clouds and... curiously enough, there is some order here. No such thing as Euclidean order – unless we trim here, add there, pull this line straight, push this odd-shaped bump into a nice arc – but a self-similar order. There is a branching structure in the trees that resembles the branching structure of a river which resembles the bronchial structure in our lungs. And in each of these shapes, if you zoom in for a closer detail, you will find – at a point, known as bifurcation – that the design itself becomes self-similar. A fractal. Further signs of order, but still not the straight lines we like to think of as neat and orderly. Apparent randomness becomes not quite so random.

At the other end of the spectrum, we take our well-defined straight-edge and T-square and build a block that is perfect, so long as we don't look deeper into it. The imperfections we find there are the Chaos that existed in our materials – unless the materials we build the block with are themselves artificial constructs created from chemical processes, bound together in no ways Nature ever could manage by herself. And as Mankind imposes his Order upon the world, it gets further and further away from the world created for us, prior to our efforts to tidy things up.

So much for Order and Chaos. In the film version, this can all be summed up as "Man as God."

Before we get back to another quote from our piece or discuss the relevancy of Order and Chaos to AI, lets take another quick look at Childlike and Childish, as it has more to do with our topic at hand than might be apparent.

If you've ever had a serious philosophical discussion with a toddler (and still retained your sanity), you know how malleable the world is to their eyes. At some point, as we crush the -like out of our children, and either giving up on the -ish or pretending it was the same as whatever dreams and illusions we managed to stomp in the former activities, we instruct them that the world is this way and that way, and it's all well as long as it's ordered and scheduled and planned and processed. We have attempted to teach them "what to think and what to feel" – we have installed ourselves as dictators, and we have taught them that such dictation is necessary. The more forceful we are in proving our point to our children, the more used they will become to such force. The more we back off and refuse to hurt their feelings or blacken their pride, the more they realise they can do what they want.

If we can't raise our children without falling into one of those traps, how can we be expected to create an AI that will behave as we want it to – which is to restate, capable of having free will, so long as it does what we tell it to?

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Reference Links

9. Neil Gaiman - "Seasons of Mists"
**** http://www.neilgaiman.com/comics/essay_sandman.asp
**** http://www.grovel.org.uk/reviews/sandma04/sandma04.htm

10. Benjamin Hoff - "The Tao of Pooh"

11. James Gleick – "Chaos – Making a New Science"

12. John Riggs & F. David Peat - "Turbulent Mirror"

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~ Questions and discussion welcome! ~

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