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 These ‘Withdrawn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!
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 ain’t 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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