This week, Pieces once again spent a little too much time playing dumb computer games. When will we learn that there's a world outside with people in it waiting to be talked to...
Last week, it was revealed that biological engineers in the US have been successfully working on one something that could change the way we live, and I’m willing to bet quite a lot that hardly anyone noticed. The Journal of Biological Engineering reported that bacteria have been genetically engineered to solve mathematical problems including the Hamilton Path Problem and the Burnt Pancake Problem. This news could mean the beginning of a new age of computing that moves us away from silicon-based modes of calculation to biologically based systems. I know that sounds pretty dry, but I reckon this could lead to a massive shift in the way we view computers, intelligence, and the world around us.
Right now, when I use a computer, I bash keys and click mice to input data into something that doesn’t actually think. It just processes, theoretically with the same output every time given the same input, like a washing machine. Obviously, most of my experiences of computing involve some kind of loud shouting because this doesn’t happen, but the idea behind the computer as we know it now is that it it’s very definitely a machine. It comes in a box, it makes a soft humming noise that tells me it’s actually doing something, it clicks and clunks its way through most of the stuff I need it to do, and then I turn it off. I have no cerebral connection to it because it handles information in such a different way to my own brain, and more obviously, it’s made of metal. Once we start interacting with biological systems, all of this could change. Even if it’s still housed in a little box, when I ask it to do something, it will (in it’s own special, bacterial way) think its way to the answer. It won’t just clunk through every possibility one at a time and assess which was correct; it’ll lock onto every permutation at once and instantly know the answer. Like a brain. This won’t just be a thing that I switch on, demand some answers from and turn off again – this’ll be a living thing that I ask questions.
And once we have a world in which this kind of intelligence, as opposed to artificial, silicon ‘intelligence’ is recognised, what happens to the way we view ‘intelligence’? At the moment there are a few tests of artificial intelligence that are deliberately designed to anthropomorphasise computing functions – playing grandmasters at chess, the Turing test, etc. – and one of the key reasons for this is that the intelligence that computers display is so very different from our own. The idea is that when inanimate objects are able to mimic our way of interacting (not thinking), we’ll be able to consider them truly intelligent. The flaw should be obvious – it’s like saying you’ll declare that an amazing drag queen is actually a woman because his make-up is so utterly convincing. But if we start to work with organically-based intelligence, the distinction is removed. All of a sudden, there’s no need for a Turing test, because there’s no need to prove the strength of an act of mimicry. The system doesn’t need to be humanised, because it’s not artificial in the sense that a box full of wires and chips is. It’s also very different from the dumb logic gates that populate our TVs, our kettles, our toasters, everything, unlike the box I’m typing this into. I wonder what will happen to those ‘why aren’t you doing what I tell you to’ computer moments, when we’re talking to thinking machines instead of metal boxes.
Not only that, but there’s every possibility that there’ll be as big a shift in the role of technology in the wider world as there has been with the growth of computing in the last 30 years. Only halfway through the last century it would have been unimaginable that virtually every household in the western world would have a little computing device inside it. Now we can start to think of similarly outlandish things that we might all learn to live with in the next 50 years – imagine a world where every home has a bacterial growth brewing slowly in the corner of the living room in a little petri dish. Designer petri dish, of course, someone’ll find a way to make them fashionable and make money from them. The slightly more scary thought is that once we start regularly relying on a form of intelligence that’s much closer to our own, we have to consider the ethics of every decision we make based on their calculations much more closely. Do computers have souls? Not really, it’d be difficult to argue that just because mine seems to willingly choose to disobey its master (me, allegedly) it has any kind of sense of self. Big dumb question I know, but it becomes a bit harder when you’re talking about something that doesn’t cease to exist when you turn it off, that doesn’t rely on the solid state of an electrical current and that forms answers based on a similar configuration of pathways through neural networks to your own brain. All a very long way off, probably, but the big stuff comes from big ideas that start in little petri dishes.
Now, this week’s playlist comes to you courtesy of…the same people as last week. And it’s just as much of a riot. Click below to hear it. Banzai.
1. Slave - Roots
2. The Residents - Blue Rosebuds
3. Tom Waits - Martha
4. White Williams - Smoke
5. Chas & Dave - Rabbit
6. Flanders & Swann - The Gnu Song
7. Francoise Hardy - Tout Ce Qu'on Dit
8. Roy Ayers - Can You Dig It?
9. Can - Mushroom
10. Beastie Boys - Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun
11. Kid Koala - Music For Morning People
12. Friendly Fires - Jump In The Pool
13. Atlas Sound - Winter Vacation
14. Ralph Vaughan Williams - 5 Mystical Songs, No.3, Love Bade Me Welcome
15. Nat King Cole - Lovelight
http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5or7X55QlPSnmhPryN6Hhd
More next week.
Pieces x
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