The doomsday machines (2)

When I published my first article on the doomsday machines, it was an excuse to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I’ve received good comments, some on the blog and others in private. So thanks to everyone.

We’re going to continue with the subject, but I warn you that this is a looooong series.

For lack of time this post will be a short one, but it’s fundamental for what follows, and if I take a while to publish, be patient: one has to work to pay for the blog’s hosting.

What is life?

Faced with scientists’ inability to agree on “what life is”, some have adopted an operational definition:

A living being is characterized by:

1. Its ability to preserve itself, that is, to stay alive, operational, functional, for as long as possible.

2. Its ability to reproduce. Because there are limits (the laws of thermodynamics, for example), we can’t expect a living being to live forever, so living beings reproduce as a way of preserving themselves over time.

3. Its ability to evolve. To evolve is to adapt; whatever doesn’t adapt to changes in its environment dies.

This is an operational definition, which means that if an entity fulfills these functions, we will consider it alive.

It’s controversial, it’s debatable, we can philosophize all we want, but if we want to explore whether it’s possible to build an AI, we have to start somewhere. If we hit a dead end, then we look for another starting point.

The first path we’ll take is that of the proponents of Artificial Life. According to this school, if you reproduce the path of evolution you will eventually arrive at living entities, artificial but intelligent.

Important questions come up:

• Is life necessary for an intelligent entity to emerge?

• Is self-awareness a requirement for being intelligent?

• We have an operational definition of life, but we need to work out an operational definition of what being self-aware is, and of what it means to be intelligent.

Those are the problems we’ll explore. There are many positions, but in the next post we’ll explore Artificial Life, and how it has been used to try to create artificial intelligence.

But I’ll leave you with a little exercise: given the operational definition above, can we say the Internet is a living being?