5 in 5 (5)

5 in 5 – 5

Making a thing

Enough talk, time to get started on actually making an intelligence. It’s genuinely mind-blowing to read about other kinds of intelligences, and a talk at the World Science Festival took it a step further. I sincerely urge you to listen to this panel speak. In the midst of some heavy science flavoured flirting, you’ll realise how we’re living in the midst of some truly alien creatures right here on our very own planet.

After all this listening, I simply had to take a crack at trying to create my own intelligent being. I started coding using p5js and after some thinking, I decided to take an interative approach at creating this intelligence. First, I created the Being. A simple white square on the screen. It’s very existence on the screen hinted at intelligence. I could’ve simply left it at this stage, content with the intelligence it had.

But I decided to press on further. Eager to give it some capabilities, I blessed it with the ability to move. It would hobble about at random, with no intent or direction. It now existed and could move around.

I then gave it a sense, the sense to feel when another presence is close to it. In this case, it can sense the cursor close it’s physical being.

To give it a sense of purpose and a way to sustain itself, I then gave it the ability to eat, and additionally the ability to sense food.

Interact with the intelligent Being here:

Although it was challenging coding these rules in, the process of doing so did get me thinking about intelligence, and the purpose of my creation. Staring at a blank screen, I couldn’t think of anything radical, and so I give it an intelligence I was familiar with-locomotion, eating, and sensing. My context heavily influenced the decisions I made. Given enough time and space, perhaps I might be able to break out of this context bubble and think of different kinds of intelligences.

The value of the intelligence is heavily dependent within the context within which it exists. An ant’s intelligence may not be very useful as a single entity as compared to a nest of ants. Human intelligence may be very well suited for Earth, but could be completely useless on Venus, or on a different plane of existence.

Could there be other kinds of intelligences which machine intelligences could adopt? Perhaps intelligences that aren’t purely functional, but serve to add other kinds of value? What would a non-human centered machine intelligence look like? Or a planet-centered one? Time to join the Machinists.