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Creative Computers. What Do They Want?

By Peter Lloyd

The best ideas seem to have been kicking around longer than you might think. So it makes sense that a question like, “Will computers ever think or create?” and a concept like artificial intelligence might be found hanging around with the earliest versions of computers.

According to the current timeline, the abacus appeared some four thousand years ago. Adding machines go back to the 17th century. But rather than IBM’s ENIAC, the first programmable computer appeared in the plans of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. It earns the designation of first Turing-complete design for a general-purpose computer, even though Babbage preceded Alan Turing and his idea of computing completeness by about a century.

Turing outlined what has come to be known as the concept of the Turing machine in his 1948 essay Intelligent Machinery. This post-ENIAC work begins with an early glimmer of what we now call artificial intelligence: “I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behavior.”

painting of lovelaceThe first computer programmer, who wrote code for Babbage’s never-completed machine, turns out to be Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Ada Lovelace saw that the Analytical Engine could do more than just calculate. She predicted that it might make music and manipulate symbols. No surprise then that she would consider the idea of artificial intelligence, but she rejected it. Her rejection of machine creativity has become known as the Lovelace objection:
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.
Creating a creative machine certainly seems possible, however, when you face the fact that we humans are soft machines with computer-like networks of neurons. The eventual inventors of the creative computer should not be daunted by the fact that we are more complex than anything we’ve invented so far—from the abacus to the iPad or even the fictional HAL 9000. Tomorrow’s creative computer inventors just have to head in a new direction.

Humans and other primates create because we do something no inventor, as far as I know, has considered incorporating into his or her design. We feel. We create for reward, whether it comes as pleasure from the act of creation itself or reward from our success. To create an intelligent and creative machine, then, an inventor would have to answer the question, “What does a machine want?”

See also:
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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