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Comment by Beltiras | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that we give humans a lot of time doing trial and error and acknowledge them as masters of some art but then when a machine process fails to deliver on it's first baby steps declare that the endeavor is impossible?

Creativity is experimentation coupled with the insight of previous work. Computers can do the experimentation, they just need longer horizons of insight to be able to moderate.

On the other hand thou: AGI is a far way off. I'm not expecting anything HAL-like within my lifetime. Unless my lifespan will be artificially prolonged.

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I absolutely agree.

Take this assertion from the article: "But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. That’s what I think of as creativity—somebody comes up with something really new and clever." -- I find this disingenuous. Creativity is just the outcome of our particular experiences, it's a way to parse our hundreds of thousands of hours of experience we get even at an early age into a new combination. There's no small algorithm that without a mountain of data ("experience") will generate clever insights from simple requests.

To say nothing of the fact that billions of years of evolution imparts a large set of choices made for us. It didn't take 16 years to get a teenage virtuoso violinist, it took 3 billion years of evolution.

It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good.

Given our current trajectory, it wouldn't be shocking if at 150-200 years of hardware research and with <5 years of training, the intentionally created thing surpassed the evolved one.

Ed: I rolled software in with hardware.

> It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good.

The 3 billion years of evolution are still at the foundation of computer research. It's not like computers are spontaneously appearing out of thin vacuum via quantum fluctuations.

but computer like structures do pop up in incredibly simple situations. seashells for instance.

There's another aspect to consider:

When people express themselves in a creative way, they do so so that other people (and themselves!) can appreciate it. We create art for other people - we don't create for animals or plants or robots. Other people can appreciate our art because it may express an emotional and/or psychological state that resonates with them.

Now if we avoid the question of whether or not an AI can be considered creative if it does not express itself voluntarily, how can we judge the "quality" of its art? If it's doing so because it evokes a favourable internal state whenever it observes it, could that not be considered art?

(When you listen to a piece of music and it makes you feel good, would you not consider that a good piece music?)

I consider music that makes me feel anguish to be a good piece of music too (given the right circumstances).

So the question is, how do we make a computer selfish.

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