George Dyson Talks AI in the Wild

A favorite writer has some provocative ideas in The Edge.

AI That Evolves in the Wild
A Talk By George Dyson [8.14.19]

I’m interested not in domesticated AI—the stuff that people are trying to sell. I'm interested in wild AI—AI that evolves in the wild. I’m a naturalist, so that’s the interesting thing to me. Thirty-four years ago there was a meeting just like this in which Stanislaw Ulam said to everybody in the room—they’re all mathematicians—"What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?" It’s a higher-level symptom. It’s not how the brain works. All those guys knew fully well that the brain was not fundamentally logical.

We’re in a transition similar to the first Macy Conferences. The Teleological Society, which became the Cybernetics Group, started in 1943 at a time of transition, when the world was full of analog electronics at the end of World War II. We had built all these vacuum tubes and suddenly there was free time to do something with them, so we decided to make digital computers. And we had the digital revolution. We’re now at exactly the same tipping point in history where we have all this digital equipment, all these machines. Most of the time they’re doing nothing except waiting for the next single instruction. The funny thing is, now it’s happening without people intentionally. There we had a very deliberate group of people who said, "Let’s build digital machines." Now, I believe we are building analog computers in a very big way, but nobody’s organizing it; it’s just happening.  .... '

GEORGE DYSON is a historian of science and technology and author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral. George Dyson's Edge Bio Page
[ED. NOTE:] As a follow-up to the completion of the book Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, we are continuing the conversation as the “Possible Minds Project.” The first meeting was at Winvian Farm in Morris, CT. Over the next few months we are rolling out the fifteen talks—videos, EdgeCasts, transcripts.