There was an interesting post in the Artificial Intelligence forum on StackExchange about where the field of Artificial Life has gone. Why don't we read much about it. See
I felt inspired to respond and here's what I said:
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Thank you for the very thorough analysis of what is going on in the
field of Artificial Life. I read a lot about this when I was in
graduate school in AI in the late 90's and it seemed promising. I had
noticed very few articles about AL in the main-stream media.
One possible reason for a low public profile is that the very concept of AL is seen as threatening by many religious groups who believe strongly in strong "creation" that occurred in "a day". There are, of course, also religious groups that believe in weak "creation" which could involve many years of "directed intervention" by a Creator, and an even weaker version of creation of life similar to baking a cake -- that is, only the starting conditions are specified by a Creator, and then the whole thing "evolves spontaneously" but still ends up where the Creator intended.
Of course at the time society made distinctions between creation and evolution, programmers created code by hand-crafting each line, and "evolution" was hands-off, and there was clear white-space margins between them. Then, with the advent of genetic algorithms, etc, programmers sometimes solved problems by "evolving" solutions, so the distinction became quite blurred in the mind of thoughtful observers.
In my mind, looking at Artificial Life as the study of all possible pathways of evolution, the field of self-reproducing machines, such as used for remote mining colonies, barely scratches the surface.
I think using AL modeling to try to figure out what we can say for sure, or at least bracket, for extraterrestrial life is an important topic, but I have no idea where the frontier is. It seems a topic that will abruptly become relevant on first contact when there is no time to do a good analysis. It seems a topic of military significance in the same vein. For that matter, it could suggest where efforts to contact -- or detect -- other life forms might be focused, besides looking at serial-string messages coded onto electromagnetic waves.
To me, however, even more pressing and imminent are questions that AL might illuminate about the nature of multi-level, emergent, entities that may not be "alive" in the classical biological sense, but that certainly behave as if they are alive in a practical sense. Examples are groups, cultures, religions, polarized mutually-hating communities in society today, nation-states, and of course "corporations". In the US, the entities called "corporations" have many of the rights and responsibilities of "persons" under US law.
All of those larger entities are what I have termed MAWBA - for "Might as Well Be Alive". For all practical purposes they are alive. In fact in one Biology 101 text I consulted, they satisfied every one of the listed properties of "Life". They seek food. The are self-protective. They sense their environments and respond to changes in their environment. They can reproduce ( split ) although unlike most biological life,they can also "merge" and, Borg-like, "acquire". In fact, since they are "composed" of people, and people are composed of cells, one could argue a nit-picking point that corporations are in fact composed of cells, and therefore satisfy the last requirement of the definition of life in biology.
So what? So understanding and modeling how hierarchical swarms of composite life forms could possibly evolve can lead to insights and great questions about what possible pathways society and government on earth might take in the very near future.
Understanding regulatory-feedback systems in pure form could lead to vast improvements in the design of regulatory systems on a national scale, such as laws and regulations. What should be regulated or centrally mandated? what must be regulated in order to survive? What must never be micro-managed in order to survive? What are the theoretical limits, based on such totally general models, to "freedom"? Can you demonstrate, versus wave your hands, that dictatorships are bad ideas? Can you demonstrate, versus hand-wave, that diversity is crucial to long-term survival because mono-culture is vulnerable to sudden-death? The last question could suggest looking at a vulnerability the USA has today of having such a large fraction of business carried out using one product, Microsoft Windows, because if that suddenly becomes unworkable, there are just not enough Linux and Mac users out there for us to recover gracefully, if at all.
So in that light Artificial Life could inform a solid theoretical framework to the rather important and hotly debated issue of what the proper role is of government in our lives. What are the pros and cons of too much and too little central control? Can we prove, at least to our satisfaction, that China is doomed, despite remarkable economic success lately, and that centralized control cannot, in a theoretical sense, possibly ever work, period? And here is where it is unstable? And here is where to intervene with a crowbar if one wanted to exploit that vulnerability? And most importantly, are these thoughts opinions, based on whim, or on God's revealed Word, or are they demonstrable in an Artificial Life Lab?
As we approach "the Singularity" (2030 as Ray Kurzweil predicted, I think) we should indeed care about whether human-computer merged life-forms could exist, and if they should, could they exist in a form other than the dreaded Star-Trek "Borg"?
In fact, a good deal of thinking in the USA is centered on personal freedom, or more lately corporate freedom of action, and the very words "collective" or "one world government" are calls to violent retaliation. Can that extreme bias be supported by theoretical models of all possible higher life forms, or is it more legacy hand-waving? Are there solutions to "becoming one" and "unity" that preserve diversity and as much local freedom of action as possible while still maintaining social stability against all threats, foreign and domestic, including extreme polarization, civil war, rise of fascism, or corruption in high places?
I think the questions that could be asked and modeled in Artificial Life are really interesting, timely, and urgent. I wish we'd see more about it in the press.
One possible reason for a low public profile is that the very concept of AL is seen as threatening by many religious groups who believe strongly in strong "creation" that occurred in "a day". There are, of course, also religious groups that believe in weak "creation" which could involve many years of "directed intervention" by a Creator, and an even weaker version of creation of life similar to baking a cake -- that is, only the starting conditions are specified by a Creator, and then the whole thing "evolves spontaneously" but still ends up where the Creator intended.
Of course at the time society made distinctions between creation and evolution, programmers created code by hand-crafting each line, and "evolution" was hands-off, and there was clear white-space margins between them. Then, with the advent of genetic algorithms, etc, programmers sometimes solved problems by "evolving" solutions, so the distinction became quite blurred in the mind of thoughtful observers.
In my mind, looking at Artificial Life as the study of all possible pathways of evolution, the field of self-reproducing machines, such as used for remote mining colonies, barely scratches the surface.
I think using AL modeling to try to figure out what we can say for sure, or at least bracket, for extraterrestrial life is an important topic, but I have no idea where the frontier is. It seems a topic that will abruptly become relevant on first contact when there is no time to do a good analysis. It seems a topic of military significance in the same vein. For that matter, it could suggest where efforts to contact -- or detect -- other life forms might be focused, besides looking at serial-string messages coded onto electromagnetic waves.
To me, however, even more pressing and imminent are questions that AL might illuminate about the nature of multi-level, emergent, entities that may not be "alive" in the classical biological sense, but that certainly behave as if they are alive in a practical sense. Examples are groups, cultures, religions, polarized mutually-hating communities in society today, nation-states, and of course "corporations". In the US, the entities called "corporations" have many of the rights and responsibilities of "persons" under US law.
All of those larger entities are what I have termed MAWBA - for "Might as Well Be Alive". For all practical purposes they are alive. In fact in one Biology 101 text I consulted, they satisfied every one of the listed properties of "Life". They seek food. The are self-protective. They sense their environments and respond to changes in their environment. They can reproduce ( split ) although unlike most biological life,they can also "merge" and, Borg-like, "acquire". In fact, since they are "composed" of people, and people are composed of cells, one could argue a nit-picking point that corporations are in fact composed of cells, and therefore satisfy the last requirement of the definition of life in biology.
So what? So understanding and modeling how hierarchical swarms of composite life forms could possibly evolve can lead to insights and great questions about what possible pathways society and government on earth might take in the very near future.
Understanding regulatory-feedback systems in pure form could lead to vast improvements in the design of regulatory systems on a national scale, such as laws and regulations. What should be regulated or centrally mandated? what must be regulated in order to survive? What must never be micro-managed in order to survive? What are the theoretical limits, based on such totally general models, to "freedom"? Can you demonstrate, versus wave your hands, that dictatorships are bad ideas? Can you demonstrate, versus hand-wave, that diversity is crucial to long-term survival because mono-culture is vulnerable to sudden-death? The last question could suggest looking at a vulnerability the USA has today of having such a large fraction of business carried out using one product, Microsoft Windows, because if that suddenly becomes unworkable, there are just not enough Linux and Mac users out there for us to recover gracefully, if at all.
So in that light Artificial Life could inform a solid theoretical framework to the rather important and hotly debated issue of what the proper role is of government in our lives. What are the pros and cons of too much and too little central control? Can we prove, at least to our satisfaction, that China is doomed, despite remarkable economic success lately, and that centralized control cannot, in a theoretical sense, possibly ever work, period? And here is where it is unstable? And here is where to intervene with a crowbar if one wanted to exploit that vulnerability? And most importantly, are these thoughts opinions, based on whim, or on God's revealed Word, or are they demonstrable in an Artificial Life Lab?
As we approach "the Singularity" (2030 as Ray Kurzweil predicted, I think) we should indeed care about whether human-computer merged life-forms could exist, and if they should, could they exist in a form other than the dreaded Star-Trek "Borg"?
In fact, a good deal of thinking in the USA is centered on personal freedom, or more lately corporate freedom of action, and the very words "collective" or "one world government" are calls to violent retaliation. Can that extreme bias be supported by theoretical models of all possible higher life forms, or is it more legacy hand-waving? Are there solutions to "becoming one" and "unity" that preserve diversity and as much local freedom of action as possible while still maintaining social stability against all threats, foreign and domestic, including extreme polarization, civil war, rise of fascism, or corruption in high places?
I think the questions that could be asked and modeled in Artificial Life are really interesting, timely, and urgent. I wish we'd see more about it in the press.
