Dancing With The Atoms

I know this was started as a blog about my developing insights on our relationships with mediated messages. Sticking to the theme has its merits of course, but it is when we step outside our familiar zones of understanding and comfort that we begin to grow, often reinterpreting our understandings and producing new insight that may inspire more intuition than the original ones. In other words, travel is mind-expanding. Sometimes the travel may involve physically moving from Point A to Point B, or it may involve travelling from Point A to Point C20H25N3O, or it may involve just reading another blog on foreign auto repair that somehow describes principles that can be applied to other circumstances, such as media effects. Again, stepping outside of “the house” leads us to new experiences and new ideas. Today’s blog post is a result of seeing what else is out there.

Some ideas have recently come together in my mind and need to be expressed before they get diluted, overgrown, or just vanish from the ideasphere. The first is Kurzweil and his prediction of The Technological Singularity. The second is the uses and gratifications assumption that people tend to approach mediated characters in manners similar to those in which they approach real-life characters.

I imagine most people react with horror when confronted with the idea of artificial intelligence advancing beyond human intelligence, especially after seeing all those Matrix and Terminator movies. In entertainment, the machinery can always be interpreted as a metaphor for ourselves, and humans are always the oppressed, either serving as batteries or some kind of threat to silicate dominance over carbon. I had an employer once who was incredibly insecure; she felt she had to adopt an image as a ruthless manager to be able to be respected in an institutional division predominantly composed of men. Her ruthless management tactics made many people feel dehumanized, and she proved to be an effective manager but incompetent as a leader. We tend to attribute such inflexible management styles to machines, but attribute leadership and inspiration to humans, such as John Connor, though his leadership style may be considered inhuman in a call center setting, but quite inspirational in a post-apocalyptic setting. We all need both leadership and management in our lives, and carbon and silicon, in our minds, have quite different attributes. We consider leadership and inspiring people to success to be human and associated with carbon-based lifeforms, but what about AI and silicon-based life. Silicon has the potential to be intelligent, possibly more so than its carbon-based creators.

If it is intelligent, however, is it artificial? Would it have values in any similar sense as humans have values, dreams, and ideas that we pursue? Or is the relationship more like a carbon atom picking up a silicon atom and using it as a tool, much like the scene from 2001 in which an ape picks up a bone and changes history? And could we be looking at a process in which carbon life begets silicon life, which begets tin-based life, which begets lead-based life, and so forth. If this notion sounds bizarre, take a look at a periodic table and remember that all these elements have 4-bonds, and being able to engage four different atoms at once may be a basis for any form of life. Perhaps it is also a chemometaphor for how we should manage our own lives: no more than 4 major pursuits at a time.

A quick perusal of the Internet suggests that carbon has the most stable of bonds with other atoms, relative to other elements that exist in the +4 state, with silicon a second. Life forms have to be rugged and durable to survive, as far as we know, and forms of life based on +4 atoms deeper in the periodic table, with greater chemical weights may not be able to survive. It is for this reason that I believe AI will serve more as an extension of carbon-based life, likely a kaleidoscope of tools for assisting the struggle for existence, but life will always be limited to carbon-based structures.

My take on The Technological Singularity, courtesy of Kurzweil, is that we are in store for more of a human-machine hybrid future. Human minds interacting with AI, or perhaps ending up in a synergistic relationship between AI and human minds. Carbon and silicon dancing together at a honky tonk, surrounded by oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and whatever other elements are necessary for communication between various components. Kurzweil suggests that we will be replaced at a cellular level by silicon-based machines which fight off our old friends known as diseases and old age. I like to believe that such a scenario – one in which our cells are gradually replaced by better nanomachines, is an inspiring one, and am no longer particularly horrified by the idea. In fact, understanding biological functions, characteristics, and makeup to the point we can do a better job of performing the same tasks through engineering has a certain appeal for me.