I’m trying to predict what’s going to happen in the very near future but it’s very difficult. In 2012 we thought we would have autonomous cars in 2022 and that the tools of creativity were very hypothetical. The opposite has happened.
Making predictions is indeed difficult, especially about the future, as Mark Twain observed. :)
However, I think you have an important point here. People tend to make predictions about AI based on the assumption that humans are the benchmark for everything and somehow very special, in particular concerning creativity. So it must be much easier to automate driving than writing a creative text. Many argue that what ChatGPT outputs is not creative, but “just statistics”, even though it is every bit as original as most of what humans can create.
I’ve known for quite some time that “creativity” mostly means recombining original thoughts made by others. Most of our modern novels are based on concepts that the ancient Greeks invented, for instance. You cannot write a novel without first having read a few hundred novels written by others, and I owe most of my creative process to the inspiration I get from authors like Stanislav Lem, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and many others.
Creativity is not a magical, mysterious process that only humans can do. For example, I have a set of “story cards”, divided into “setting”, “character”, and “plot”, which I sometimes use to generate story ideas. They are not generating complete, detailed storys, of course, but they still show that a large part of the creative process is just random combination. I even wrote an essay for a German magazine in 2009, arguing that the greatest artist of the 21st century might be a machine. At the time, I didn’t expect this to happen during my lifetime, though.
As you say, we reason too much with our current knowledge, like every society in the past that thought it understood everything about the universe.
Some people suggest Dyson spheres and Von Neumann probes, but an advanced AI could very well find these inventions unnecessary to build and imagine many other things to prioritize goals that we don’t know yet.
Making predictions is indeed difficult, especially about the future, as Mark Twain observed. :)
However, I think you have an important point here. People tend to make predictions about AI based on the assumption that humans are the benchmark for everything and somehow very special, in particular concerning creativity. So it must be much easier to automate driving than writing a creative text. Many argue that what ChatGPT outputs is not creative, but “just statistics”, even though it is every bit as original as most of what humans can create.
I’ve known for quite some time that “creativity” mostly means recombining original thoughts made by others. Most of our modern novels are based on concepts that the ancient Greeks invented, for instance. You cannot write a novel without first having read a few hundred novels written by others, and I owe most of my creative process to the inspiration I get from authors like Stanislav Lem, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and many others.
Creativity is not a magical, mysterious process that only humans can do. For example, I have a set of “story cards”, divided into “setting”, “character”, and “plot”, which I sometimes use to generate story ideas. They are not generating complete, detailed storys, of course, but they still show that a large part of the creative process is just random combination. I even wrote an essay for a German magazine in 2009, arguing that the greatest artist of the 21st century might be a machine. At the time, I didn’t expect this to happen during my lifetime, though.
As you say, we reason too much with our current knowledge, like every society in the past that thought it understood everything about the universe.
Some people suggest Dyson spheres and Von Neumann probes, but an advanced AI could very well find these inventions unnecessary to build and imagine many other things to prioritize goals that we don’t know yet.