Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The premise of this discussion is that the development of AI should not be considered in technical isolation, but rather seen as the next potential step in the evolution of intelligent life on Earth. While important issues are not treated lightly, the focus of the discussion is primarily on the 'bigger picture'.

As such, the discussion does cover a wide sweep of topics that are believed to be relevant to the potential development of a concept being called 'Hybrid AI' and its eventual impact on the future of humanity. However, if you are new to such ideas you might wish to work through some of the sub-sections in sequence:

The introduction tries to quickly separate out the issues of artificial life and a concept known as 'the singularity' from the more present-day ideas of artificial intelligence. However, the core of the discussion will still focus on a new paradigm, described as hybrid AI, which could evolve and ultimately supersede our current definition of Homo-Sapiens. There is also a presentation of a broad range of predictions, which may have already influenced your perception of AI, therefore it might be useful to reflect on the range of ideas that surround this topic before addressing the details in any further depth. Following this, subsequent sub-sections will then seek to expand the discussion to include not only technology issues, but also philosophical and social issues, as the implications of AI have the potential to go well beyond the confines of science.

YouTube Video-3
Overview presentation of the discussion of Hybrid AI evolution.

Artificial Life
Link to complementary discussion of potential developments in ALife.

Paradigm Shifts
The link above points to a 300 page book that encapulates all the original work contained in this website related to AI and the wider issues surrounding the evolution of artificial life - see Economic Evolution for more details.

Human Evolution
This is a link to another set of discussions on the evolution of humanity, past, present and future, which includes an AI update.

E. O. Wilson
Homo sapiens is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

John McCarthy
Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do. We shall say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficient wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.

Jack Copeland
An important concept both in Artificial Life and in Artificial Intelligence is that of a genetic algorithm (GA). GAs employ methods analogous to the processes of natural evolution in order to produce successive generations of software entities that are increasingly fit for their intended purpose.