ARTificial intelligence --- and Da Vinci can't save us this time. [Part One]

ENIAC, the world's first Turing-complete computer introduced in 1946 was in itself a work of art. As decades went by technology advanced rapidly. The faster new technology was introduced, the quicker newer technologies that could replace the former were coming into play. This is what experts on this topic like to call "Law of Accelerating Returns."

To better get your head to wrap around this phrase, a brilliant analogy was put forth by Tim Urban, a writer for Wait But Why. It goes something like this:

Imagine taking a time machine back to 175 - a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing - those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

But here’s the interesting thing; if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750 — transportation, communication, etc.— definitely wouldn’t make him die.
No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, he’d have to go much farther back—maybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer world—from a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal species—saw the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being “inside,” and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery—he’d likely die.

And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, he’d show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay what’s your point who cares.” For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, he’d have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.



So, advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right? The first ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence could be lurking right round the corner, ready to pounce upon mankind with a baseball bat in hand.

But I think i'm getting ahead of myself. First let me briefly discuss what an AI is. Frankly, if someone asked that to me two hours ago, I would've been like "uh y'know those cool transformer-like robots we see in movies. Umm I don't know man."

So let’s clear things up. First, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI, sometimes mimicking the human form, sometimes not but the AI itself is the computer inside the robot. AI is the brain, and the robot is its body, if it even has a body. For example, the software and data behind Siri is AI, the woman’s voice we hear is a personification of that AI, and there’s no robot involved at all.
Or take the example of Ava- the female bot in Ex Machina- the "wet ware" that doubles as her brain is the AI while her physical form is it's container.

Furthermore, this topic has been studied quite deeply and AI has been categorized into 3 different chunks:

1). Artificial Narrow Intelligence, ANI: In layman's terms this is the weak AI. It far excels what a human can achieve but only in one particular field. For example, there's an AI that can beat the world champion at Black Jack, but ask it to calculate your tax returns and it will just blankly stare at you.


2). Artificial General Intelligence, AGI: This is strong AI or human-level AI. This is a machine that is equally as competent as a human to carry out any intellectual task that a human can. Professor Linda Gottfredson describes intelligence as “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.” This describes all the basic functions of the human brain's frontal lobe (something any A level biology student would know. ) AGIs don't exist and some crazy scientist has yet to create it.


3). Artificial Super Intelligence, ASI: Oxford philosopher and leading AI thinker Nick Bostrom defines super intelligence as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” ASI is the reason the topic of AI is so controversial and why AI is often held in semblance with the terms extinction and immortality


We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don’t realize it’s AI.  John McCarthy, who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1956, complained that “as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”

Planet Earth functions around ANI. Your phone is a little ANI factory. When you navigate using your map app, receive tailored music recommendations from Youtube, check tomorrow’s weather, set up an alarm or dozens of other everyday activities, you’re using ANI. Google Translate is another classic ANI system; impressively good at one narrow task. Voice recognition is another, and there are a bunch of apps that use those two ANIs as a tag team, allowing you to speak a sentence in one language and have the phone spit out the same sentence in another.



[Untimely end of Part One]





This post in nothing more than a long-winded text book definition of AI. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way; my intention was to churn out my thoughts and opinions on AI, which mind you, I am very opinionated about.  But I needed to get some jargon cleared up first before I could go on a high speed rant. So yes, I just Peter- Jacksoned my post, though I won't be making more money, much less making any money at all.

WHAT DO SILLY PUTTY AND TOMATO KETCHUP HAVE IN COMMON?

No, i'm not asking you a riddle, which in hindsight would have been a funnier way to start this post.
I spent nearly two hours browsing through various science majors that one could pursue and one called comparative planetology caught my eye. Upon further digging (comparative PALEONTOLOGY amirite?), I found out that this particular field focuses on studying mundane objects to observe celestial bodies (no I don't mean Beyoncé) in our solar system.

One of the major analogies that was being used to explain the various shapes of craters on the moons of planets like Jupiter is the viscosity of silly putty compared to that of ketchup. Silly putty is not just a fancy American word for Play-Doh. Silly putty is more elastic and does not hold it's shape so it is not suitable for sculptural work. In other words, it's "silly." And the thing that is common between silly putty and ketchup is that they are both non-Newtonian fluids, meaning that their flow properties are different from a Newtonian fluid a.k.a 'normal' fluid like water or oil.

A non-Newtonian fluid is a mixture that takes on properties of both a fluid and a solid. This is analogous to the wave-particle duality (something that is much closer to home and thus had a hand in helping me understand the non-Newtonian fluid enigma.)

If you want a more robust definition, this is what wikipedia has to say:
"A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid with properties that differ in any way from those of Newtonian fluids. Most commonly, the viscosity (the measure of a fluid's ability to resist gradual deformation by shear or tensile stresses) of non-Newtonian fluids is dependent on shear rate or shear rate history."

And there is also a graph to go along with the above definition, in case you were still skeptical about the whole "defying THE Sir Isaac Newton thing":



[Nope you can't walk on water] <----- go to the link if you care enough.

Anyway, enough about the crazy albeit "silly" antics one can pull (no pun intended) with non-Newtonian fluids. Let's talk dirty (I mean, chemistry.) [More wikipedia] The polymers in silly putty have covalent bonds within the molecules, but hydrogen bonds between the molecules. The hydrogen bonds are easily broken. When small amounts of stress are slowly applied to the putty, only a few bonds are broken and the putty "flows". When larger amounts of stress are applied quickly, there are many hydrogen bonds that break, causing the putty to break or tear. (gosh, I hate chem but thanks to George Facer I at least have a working knowledge of this god-awful subject)

Hence, if a 50 pound spherical mass of silly putty was to be dropped from a tall building (just for kicks, say it was dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa), it would shatter on impact with the ground. This is because it is a non-newtonian fliud or is viscoelastic. Which means that if handled slowly it acts like a liquid, but if handled at high speeds or vigorously, it acts like a solid. So when it hit the ground it was basically a solid ball of plastic and shattered.

To FURTHER explain non-Newtonian fluids, lets talk about sauce [baby, let talk about you and me....i'm sorry but I was watching Pitch Perfect]. You must've experienced the frustration of not being able to pour the right amount of ketchup out of the bottle. Either nothing comes out, or the pacific ocean just landed on your plate. This is actually due to the viscosity of ketchup, which can be affected by how much force you apply to the ketchup bottle or by how long you have been trying to get something to come out of it.

What does any of this have to do with Comparative Planetology? The subject was brought up because rocks and other materials that make up objects in our Solar System have a viscous flow over geologic time scales (fancy word for historic timeline). More specifically, formations on planet surfaces, such as craters or mountains, have a relaxation time, just as silly putty will relax and deform from a vertical position to a flatter one. Comparing different craters shows us some are more defined than others, causing scientists to theorize viscous interiors for observed objects, just as the Earth’s mantle is a viscous layer.
 

For example, researchers have noticed significant differences between craters on the Moon and craters on Ganymede (picture 1), one of Jupiter’s moons. The Moon’s craters (picture 2) are very clear and well-defined; there’s hardly any visible relaxation. Ganymede, on the other hand, has craters that are flattened. Notice in the image below of Ganymede: several of the more recent craters are deep and well-defined, but the others in the surrounding area appear faded. Something had to make those craters deform like this, and viscous flow is go-to theory for geologists. Composition is also suspected to play a big part in it, considering Ganymede is an icy satellite while the Moon is just a lump of rock. Ice relaxes much faster than rock, confirmed by these observations.

                     

So there you have it. Silly putty and ketchup helped us learn about the behavior of materials, which have been used to help us observe our Solar System. By observing other objects, we hope to eventually figure out the best theory for our own planet’s formation, which we actually do not know as much about as people would think!

(I am seriously contemplating majoring in astrophysics now, though studying engineering alongside will make that almost impossible.)


P.S: Original title was going to be 'What do silly putty and mustard sauce have in common' but I'm not much of a fan of mustard sauce.

P.P.S: Douglas Adams broached this topic in his book The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, in a poem entitled "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning."

P.P.P.S: Congratulations to you if you managed to make it to the end of this post.