by Jokeblue » 08 Jan 2014 07:47
That's a hard question. For a computer to be able to be creative, it needs to be able to explore and learn and invent things from what it doesn't already know - It needs to learn and think. It would be easy to have a computer put a finite list of possibilities into a randomized generator and come up with an outcome for it, but that's not being creative as it's not doing it itself - it's taking things we've already given to it and it's running it through something else to make something for it.
For a computer to be creative, it needs to learn, it needs to think. I'll use music as an example. The process of making music is very creative. It generally involves taking sounds that don't yet exist as an arrangement and making something from that idea. When I make music, usually after coming up worth some melody worth using I start to hear how I want the rest of the song to go. And so I take these sounds in my head and create something from it. When you make music, you put their experience into it. Your knowledge of music, how you think it should sound, how you want it to sound - Your feelings and emotions at the time - happiness, sadness, anger... When making music - you use your knowledge, your experience and pretty much who you are as a person to shape and develop something that doesn't exist.
You could create a computer which could use a randomizing program to come up with a song - but the limitations to this are that the computer can only use what you give it to make one of the possibilities sequenced by what you have preprogrammed. Have you created a computer that creates music? Or have you created a machine that manufactures what you have told it to manufacture? And even then, what it makes would be musically and mathematically correct in order to stay within the bounds that you have created for it. If it created music form that would it be like anything a human would make? And if you gave it no bounds, as is a part of having human potential to create something new - would the machine create something of musical worth?
If you were depressed or upset and you wrote the heaviest and most emotive song you could to reflect those emotions would you not feel it in every note of the song as you listen to it? Can a computer create music like this?
It is the same for books and stories. Could a computer write a novel as we know them?
For a computer to be creative like we are, it needs to be at such an advanced stage of artificial intelligence that it can learn and grow and experience as humans do - as we are a product of our experiences; our environments; our contexts. Why do I create the music I make or have the ideas that I do? Because this is me. It comes from who I am. Can a computer create it's own music if it already knows everything but can't think for itself? That's why I think that for a computer to be able to create as we do, it needs to essentially live, grow, and learn as we do.
And to this point - I think that if an Artificial Intelligence of such an advanced nature can live and grow like us, it should also need to be able to reach a point in it's life and creation where it becomes self aware. It needs to know that it was created, that it is essentially alive, and that one day, it will cease to exist. This awareness of Life and Death and this search for meaning in life is an essential part of being human, and is one of the reason's why we may create.
Another reason we create? Because we like to. Because we want to. Because the feeling of making something satisfies us. Thus another reason why if a computer is to create it needs to be as human in as possible. I cant stress this enough, if it doesn't grow and learn and think as we do, it will never be able to create as we do. If an Artificial Intelligence can be alive as we are, if it can want, more importantly if it can feel emotion as we do - it can create.
With many of the elements of what makes us human - our individual minds shaped by our personal growth and our contexts through life, our thoughts and feelings, our wants and desires, our search for meaning in this maelstrom of confusion wherever you may find it, our knowing that we live and that we die - These things shape who we are and what we do. And for so many of us, what we do is create things. Humanity has created it's own rise. We rose from humble beginnings, to see ourselves through creating shelters and towns, food and tools, to creating empires and travelling our world, reaching for the stars, and always advancing. This is where we made computers - in our lust for creating.
At this point in time I look at computers, and I see a tool that Mankind has created. I look at my computer and it sits there until I tell it to do something; I look at my computer and I see a machine.
To paraphrase Christopher Eccleston in 28 Days Later, It tells me that without us to advance them, they have no future. They will never create the things needed for it's own survival. They will never create things to advance their lifestyles and means of living.
If one day we can create a computer that lives and grows as we do, I think this can change. To create an Artificial Intelligence that grows and thinks as we do, that, in order to exist, must sustain itself, think and feel for itself, grow as it's self, and become it's own being - if it is as we are, will it be as we are? Will it want to create?
To answer, I think - Yes.
I hope that made sense.
I have two questions.
1) What did you think of this?
and
2) Why do you create?