Every other day I come up with a new combination of words, which I think is introducing some new concept or idea, so I rush to show it off on my blog. Don’t worry, I filter many of the combinations out, not to burden you with too much gibberish. So today I wanted to explain the connection between the different meta-tags of this blog: Emergence, Knowledge Engineering, AI, Ethics & Art.
One of my major goals in life is to develop software capable of reasoning with & measuring the concept of morality. I see it as an important thing, because it is quite evident that software machines will soon replace us as the most intelligent species around, & as we’re the ones that bringing them to life, we have some influence on their “goodness”, which will have much influence on our successors life.
Recently it has been found that the moral judgments human & other primates have, are stemming from a sub-symbolic layer of our brain, which we do not understand. It is something too deep & core in the way we think & feel, i.e., who we are. One of my favorite thinkers, the famous german artist Joseph Beuys, has once said that Art is the greatest riddle, but Man is the solution. This means that the core of what we are is our perception of Art, or its affect on us. The point in which Wittgenstein says we can’t/shouldn’t talk about, or the other thing that makes Kant wonder, besides the sky of stars.
The building of Artificial Intelligence has encountered a serious obstacle in the form of teaching machines what we call Common-Sense. These are some 100 million facts that we know, and that are a basis of our thinking. There are many powerful approaches (e.g., Cyc, ConceptNet, von Ahn’s games) to passing this obstacle. However, in order for AI to really be able to understand us, I think it should also be able to understand our deeper feelings, the essence of what we are. Perhaps it wouldn’t be able to do so, until it will be able to feel art, as we do, i.e., to have Art-Sense.
This isn’t so simple, because I think it takes more than recognizing what art is: the effect of art is deeper. It is common to think that art makes us think or see things in a new way, it surprises us & strengthens our faith in ourselves. Perhaps it should be explained in the super-organism level, as the practice of collectively forming new bondings on a deep level, which leads to growth in the intelligence of the colony. I don’t know, just throwing guesses.
Anyway, it should be an interesting engineering challenge, to create the software that will cry from the 9th, & will help machines understand us & be more friendly.
I hope the infrastructure Emergence based AI I’m working on will one day enable me to start experimenting with this.
