Out of Control - by Kevin Kelly
- Emma Hsu
- Aug 10, 2019
- 5 min read
Chapter 5: Coevolution - Cooperation without friendship or foresight
But learning is overrated as something difficult to evolve. This may have to do with our chauvinistic attachment to learning as an exclusive mark of our species. There is a strong sense, which I hope to demonstrate in this book, in which evolution itself is a type of learning. Therefore learning occurs whenever evolution is, even if artificially.
Chapter 16: The future of control - cartoon physics in toy worlds
To make digital worlds really work in the future, everything in creation will have to be reduced to equations. Not just the dinosaurs and water, but eventually the trees the dinos munched on, the jeeps (which were digital in some scenes of Jurassic Park), buildings, clothes, breakfast tables, and the weather. If this all had to happen just for the movies, it wouldn't. But every manufactured item in the near future will be designed and produced using CAD (computer assisted design) programs. Already today, automobile parts are simulated on computer screens first, and their equations later transmitted directly to the factor lathes and welders to give the numbers actual form. A new industry called automatic fabrication takes the data from a CAD and instantly generates a 3-D prototype from powered metal or liquid plastic. First an object is just lines on a screen; then it's a solid thing you can hold in your hand or walk around. Instead of printing a picture of a gear, automatic fabrication technology "prints" the actual gear it self. Emergency spare parts for factory machines are now printed out in hi-impact plastics on the factory floor, the printed object will be the authentic part. John Walker, founder of the world's premier CAD program, AutoCAD, told a reporter,
"CAD is about building models of real-world objects inside the computer. I believe in the fullness of time, every object in the world, manufactured or not, will be modeled inside a computer. This is a very, very big market. This is everything."
Read more about John Walker here: https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2008/09/an-interview-wi.html
Chapter 17: An open universe - All survive by hacking the rules
Humans seek a simple formula such as Newton's f=ma, Koza suggests, because it reflects our innate faith that at bottom there is elegant order in the universe. More importantly, simplicity is a human convenience. The heartwarming beauty we perceive in f=ma is reinforced by the cold fact that it is a much easier formula to use than Koza's spiral monster. In the days before computers and calculators, a simple equation was more useful because it was easier to compute without errors. Complicated formulas were a grind and treacherous. But, within a certain range, neither nature nor parallel computers are troubled by convoluted logic. The extra steps we find ugly and stupefying, they do perfectly in tedious exactitude.
The great irony puzzling cognitive scientists is why human consciousness is so unable to think in parallel, despite the fact that the brain runs as a parallel machine. We have an almost uncanny blind spot in our intellect. We cannot innately grasp concepts in probability, horizontal causality, and simultaneous logic. We simply don't think like that. Instead our minds were programmed in von Neumann's serial design: because that's how humans think.
And this, again, is why parallel computers must be evolved rather than designed: because we are simpletons when it comes to thinking in parallel. Computers and evolution do parallel; consciousness does serial. In a very provocative essay in the Winter 1992 Daedalus, James Bailey, director of marketing at Thinking Machines, wrote of the wonderful boomeranging influence that parallel computers have on our thinking. Entitled "First We Reshape Our Computers. Then Our Computers Reshape Us," Bailey argues that parallel computers are opening up new territories in our intellectual landscape. New styles of computer logic in turn force new questions and new perspectives from us. "Perhaps," Bailey suggests, "whole new forms of reckoning exist, forms that only make sense in parallel." Thinking like evolution may open up new doors in the universe.
John Koza sees the ability of evolution to work on both ill-defined and parallel problems as another of its inimitable advantages. The problem with teaching computers how to learn to solve problems is that so far we have wound up explicitly reprogramming them for every new problem we come across.
How can computers be designed to do what needs to be done, without being told in every instance what to do and how to do it?
Evolution, says Koza, is the answer. Evolution allows a computer's software to solve a problem to which the scope, kind, or range of the answer(s) may not be evident at all, as is usually the case in the real world. Problem: A banana hangs in a tree; what is the routine to get it? Most computer learning to date cannot solve that problem unless we explicitly clue that the program in to certain narrow parameters such as: how many ladders are nearby? Any long poles?
Having defined the boundaries of the answer, we are half answering the question. If we don't tell it what rocks are near, we know we won't get the answer "throw a rock at it." Whereas in evolution, we might. More probably, evolution would hand us answers we could have never expected: use stilts; learn to jump high, employ birds to help you; wait until it storms; make children and have them stand on your head. Evolution did not narrowly require that insects fly or swim, only that they somehow move quick enough to escape predators or catch prey. The open problem of escape led to the narrow answers of water striders tiptoeing on water or grasshoppers springing in leaps.
Every worker dabbling in artificial evolution has been struck by the ease with which evolution produces the improbable. "Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works," says Tom Ray.
Chapter 17: An open universe - the handy-dandy tool of evolution
As a tool, evolution is good for three things:
- How to get somewhere you want but can't find the route to.
- How to get somewhere you can't imagine.
- How to open up entirely new places to get to.
The third use is the door to an open universe. It is unsupervised, undirected evolution. It is Holland's ever-expanding perpetual novelty machine, the thing that creates itself.
Chapter 21: Rising flow - seven trends of hyper-evolution
Caveats aside, I discern about seven large trends or directions emerging from the ceaseless, hourly toil of organic evolution. These trends, as far as anyone can tell, are also the seven trends that will bias artificial evolution when it goes marathon; they may be said to be the Trends of Hyperevolution: Irreversibility, Increasing Complexity, Increasing Diversity, Increasing Numbers of Individuals, Increasing Specialization, Increasing Codependency, Increasing Evolvability.
Comments