Monday 6 January 2020

'Creativity is to come up with something that is new & surprising and that has value'

When Byron meets Babbage! | Kevin & Marcus on AI

Well, going swaing-o-swainggg down those good ol’ days of yore, of almost close to two decades ago, days and weeks filled with seasons of nostalgic reveries and contemplative memories, when you had such a jolly and jocund good company of kindred spirits, ‘one equal temper of heroic hearts’, after your own heart and soul, when you had all the time in the world at your own sweet disposal, well, then, you quite can’t do without touching gentle on a few of those sweet chords of note from days of yore, and happily chew the cud albeit slightly on a wistful mode too!

One such ‘wistful mode’ ruminations takes me back to a particular day’s event, way way back in the year 2003, when a few of us, a happy-go-lucky, jocund band of youngistans, - as was wont with us time and again, - we hired a cab with our ever-punctual ‘Palani travels’, our pushpak viman of all seasons for this particularly memorable city ride of ours! 

Once you had fixed up on a Palani cab, you can rest assured, that you’re not gonna have any cancellation or time delay of any sorts! Such was their punctuality!

As expected, sharp at ten we had Mr. Swami, our favourite cabbie giving us a missed call, as a sign that he’s up and ready to go! An excited cabbie makes an excited you, ain’t it? ;-)

And where pray did Mr. Swami drive us down? Well, yes, on this particular day, that marks the reason for this ‘book’ post, Mr. Swami our cab driver, was literally on full throttle mode, as we had asked him to be at the British Council Library at 11 am on the dot at the library’s premises [at which time library services get started!]

Yes! This day had added reason for delight because, we had the grand annual clearance sale of our treasure troves of knowledge – library books of all hues at the British Council Library, Anna Salai, Chennai. These ‘Withdrawn books’ on a nominal rate, were up for sale exclusively for its members! And that’s enough reason for cheers alleyyy! :-)

We had to be there this early because, sadly, and quite unfortunately, a few up and coming engineering colleges usually deputed their professors in their yellow buses, to lug up as many cartons of books as possible, for their libraries! It was customary for many such buses and tempo travellers to jostle their way into the parking space, with professors who double up as purveyors, surveyors, and conveyors quietly bulldozing their might into the crowd of bibliophiles to try their luck out, by casting their nets as deep as could be ;-) to get for themselves the huge shoals that they could possibly lay their hands on! ;-)

Some colleges had strategies chalked out over their bored oops board meetings, to outsmart others of their ilk to grab the greatest bulk, all for themselves, to bear away their treasured spoils, unmindful of the bevy of bibliophiles who have been waiting all along to get their quadrans’ worth!

Buddy Prem and myself, we were all eyes, nose and ears to this annual mela of sorts, that quite soon turned itself into a hurly-burly melee of sorts!

In spite of this hullabaloo in the BCL orchard, ;-) we did manage to get for ourselves our car’s worth of books! Mr. Swami swift acted saviour here, and helped us carry our little carton loads to our good ol’ ‘ambyyy’ cab! [Ambassador]

A pile of such books we still relish, we still cherish!

Yesterday, one such book from the past, I attempted to take out from my bookcase! And for a purpose at that!

It’s a Kevin Warwick read and it’s titled, In the Mind of the Machine: The Breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence.


Kevin Warwick, by the way, is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, says the book. But a current look at his profile and you get that, Kevin is now Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University in the United Kingdom.

Kevin's brief profile

This post will attempt to compare this 1999 read by Kevin Warwick on Artificial Intelligence [AI] with a 2019 read, again on Artificial Intelligence titled, The Creativity Code, by Marcus du Sautoy, and put forth in this little space here, the points of view of both these wizards on AI, although a gap of twenty years separate their thoughts  and takes on the subject!

Kevin Warwick is a British engineer, while Marcus du Sautoy is a British mathematician, and eleven years younger to Kevin!

Kevin, back then, has had a radically different viewpoint on AI, although he seems to have been quite a seer on the power of AI over the years!

Says he in his introductory lines to the book –

Humans live only once. We are only born once and experience everything in life afresh. We never know exactly what to expect. When we die our individual memories, many of no consequence whatsoever, die with us. With machines this is not the case. Machines can be born over and over, and retain memories from one life into the next!

Says the seer in Kevin, next –

I believe that in the next ten to twenty years some machines will become more intelligent than humans. The pace of technological chance, as we know it today, merely supports these beliefs.

He’s been a real seer of sorts on this aspect, ain’t he? The future, to Kevin then, is kinda bleak in a way, and he’s almost predicted a life of slavery for humankind out there in the near future!

However, Kevin is quite quiet on two aspects: Firstly, he doesn’t talk about the ‘code’ that governs human intelligence and creativity, which Marcus ably does!

Secondly, he is quite hush hush on the aspect of creativity to AI!

Perchance also because AI was just beginning to make a mark!

But his later books are very infotaining on the subject. Well, but that’s not our point here. The point that we are trying to make here is that, as far as technology is concerned, two decades is such a huge space of time, almost close to two past centuries, as regards the mind of the machines, with technology growing in leaps and bounds and AI making rapid strides in the field of creativity!

Kevin, although he talks about ‘Reading Robots’, he’s quite hazy and uncertain at most places on the subject per se! He’s also unclear at most times on the ‘creativity quotient’ there is to AI! Maybe they were deemed an impossibility back then!

Marcus on the other hand, in his Creativity Code, talks about cracking the ‘creativity code’ within humans and copying it on to computers, to make them paint, draw, cartoon, compose music, write poems, short stories, novels etc, as much as humans do!


Astonishing is Marcus aint he? when he says that machines can be made to paint, to draw, to cartoon, to doodle, to compose music, to write poems, to write creative fiction and non-fiction as well!!!

For a wee little moment, I felt the ground slipping beneath my feet! And for a kutty little reason at that!

To Marcus, creativity has for long been the domain proper of human endeavour.

Humans then have this extraordinary ability to imagine and innovate and to create works of art that elevate, expand and transform what it means to be human. These he calls the human code. What is going on inside our heads remains a mystery, but in the last few years a new way of thinking about code has emerged, says Marcus.

Then he goes on to define creativity! To him, creativity is to come up with something that is new & surprising and that has value.

Beautiful, ain’t it?

Creativity so cutely and aptly summed up.

Creativity then is to come up with something that is new & surprising and that has value.

‘It turns out it’s easy to make something new, but it’s the surprise and value that are more difficult to produce’, says Marcus!

But what gives something value? Is it simply a question of price? Does it have to be recognised by others? I might value a poem or a painting I’ve created but my conception of its value is unlikely to be shared more widely. A surprising novel with lots of plot twists could be of relatively little value.

But a new and surprising approach to storytelling or architecture or music that begins to be adopted by others and that changes the way we see or experience things will generally be recognised as having value.

This is what Kant refers to as ‘exemplary originality’, an original act that becomes an inspiration for others. This form of creativity has long been thought to be uniquely human.

But to Marcus, even as we begin to unpick the creative outpourings of the human species we can start to see that there are rules at the heart of the creative process.

‘Could our creativity be more algorithmic and rule-based than we might want to acknowledge?’ he asks!

Can a machine paint, compose music or write a novel? It may not be able to compete with Mozart, Shakespeare or Picasso, but could it be as creative as our children when they write a story or paint a scene? 

By interacting with the art that moves us and understanding what distinguishes it from the mundane and bland, could a machine learn to be creative? Not only that, could it extend our own creativity and help us see opportunities we are missing?

The creative impulse is a key part of what distinguishes humans from other animals and yet we often let it stagnate inside us, falling into the trap of becoming slaves to our formulaic lives, to routine, says Marcus.

I wish we could make a huge flex board of the above lines that define creativity and have it lighted up with the bestest neon lights in town, and place it in our classrooms! ;-)

Being creative requires a jolt to take us out of the smooth paths we carve out each day, he adds! And that is where a machine might help: perhaps it could give us that jolt, throw up a new suggestion, stop us from simply repeating the same algorithm each day. The machines might ultimately help us, as humans, to behave less like machines, he opines!

The great German mathematician Karl Weierstrass once wrote: ‘a mathematician that is not something of a poet will never be a true mathematician.’ As Ada Lovelace perfectly encapsulates, you need a bit of Byron as much as Babbage.

What does it take to stimulate creativity? Might it be possible to program it into a machine? Are there rules we can follow to become creative?

And this is exactly the junction where Marcus makes Byron meet Babbage! ;-)

He then talks eloquent on Algorithmically generated literature, as this new school of creativity. This new school of creativity has met with great success in the recent past, by feeding the creativity code of humans into machines, he says.

Ende Deivameyyy!

Marcus goes on -

Algorithmically generated literature is not new. A whole school of writers and mathematicians came together in France in the 1960s to use algorithms to generate new writing. The group called itself Oulipo, for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as ‘workshop for potential literature’.

One of the group’s most popular algorithms, conceived by Jean Lescure, is S + 7 (or, in English, N + 7). The algorithm takes as its input any poem and then acts on all the nouns in the poem by shifting them seven words along in the dictionary. The S stands for substantifs, which is French for ‘nouns’. The output is the ensuing rewritten version of the original poem.

For example, Blake’s poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

becomes:

To see a Worm in a Grampus of Sandblast
And a Hebe in a Wild Flu
Hold Inflow in the palsy of your hangar
And Ethos in an housefly.

Goodness gracious! ;-)

Lescure hoped this curious exercise would prompt us to revisit the original text with new eyes and ears. 

The algorithm changes the nouns but keeps the underlying structure of the sentences, so it perhaps could help reveal structural elements of language masked by the specific meaning of the words.

Queneau, a member of the Mathematical Society of France, was fascinated by the links between mathematics and creativity says Marcus.

And hence Queneau sought to experiment with different ways to generate new poetry using the tools of maths. Shortly before founding Oulipo he had composed a book of sonnets which he called 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. Ten different versions were proposed for each line.

As the Oulipo movement illustrates, poetry is particularly amenable to an algorithmic approach.

A pattern is chosen, a haiku or a sonnet, and the task of the algorithm is to choose words to match the pattern while attempting to come up with some form of overarching coherence. Whenever I’ve attempted to write poetry with a rhyming pattern, I’ve found it useful to tap into a database of words that rhyme. Weaving a line through the constraints of rhyme and rhythm is something a computer can do in spades.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the newest entrant into the aesthetic world of literary beings! –AI!!!

Now noww nowww, let’s get back to good ol’ Kevin, and see how he concludes his book on Artificial Intelligence, written almost two decades back, in 1998!

And Kevin concludes this way, when he says –

And what is the future? What might it hold? There appears to be absolutely nothing to stop machines becoming more intelligent, particularly when we look towards an intelligent machine network. All the signs are that we will rapidly become merely an insignificant historical dot.

And in the last page to his conclusion, he echoes what Stephen Hawking also foresees! The rise of the machines! Says he -

The human race, as we know it, is very likely in its end game; our period of dominance on Earth is about to be terminated. We can try and reason and bargain with the machines which take over, but why should they listen when they are far more intelligent than we are? 

All we should expect is that we humans are treated by the machines in the same way that we now treat other animals, as slave workers, energy producers or curiosities in zoos. We must obey their wishes and live only to serve all our lives, what there is of them, under the control of machines.

And it’s here that we see his angst and his agony and hence his serious suggestions for the safeguarding of humans from technology -

As the human race, we are delicately positioned. We have the technology, we have the ability, I believe, to create machines that will not only be as intelligent as humans but that will go on to be far more intelligent still. This will spell the end of the human race as we know it. Is that what we want? Should we not at least have an international body monitoring and even controlling what goes on?

When the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, killing thousands of people, we took stock of our actions and realized the threat that such weapons posed to our existence. Despite the results achieved by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, even deadlier nuclear bombs have been built, much more powerful, much more accurate and much more intelligent. But with nuclear weapons we saw what they could do and we gave ourselves another chance.

With intelligent machines we will not get a second chance. Once the first powerful machine, with an intelligence similar to that of a human, is switched on, we will most likely not get the opportunity to switch it back off again. We will have started a time bomb ticking on the human race, and we will be unable to switch it off, signs off, Kevin!

But Marcus has really got us all mystified, when he ends his book on the creativity code, with a subtle hint of AI at work! Here goes that last part –

I should come clean at this point and admit that I didn’t write all of this book myself. I succumbed to the offer made by a modern-day version of Roald Dahl’s Great Automatic Grammatizator. A 350-word section of the book was written by an algorithm that specialises in producing short-form essays based on a number of key words that you feed in. Did it pass the literary Turing Test? Did you notice?

I didn’t! ;-)

And that’s exactly where Marcus makes his mark! And howww!!!

To be continued…

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