Art is not Humane, but Just Intelligent, aka Robots Will Also Dance
How can we teach the AI to do arts? Or… is this question right? I think people are generally missing why we actually do art. Any kind of intelligence, not only should, but also will have to practice arts. In this article we will investigate into “Why”.
Curiosity for its own sake
A life form is well known for its strive to adapt to its continuously changing environment. Adaptation is not only a competency, but it is also a knowledgeable skill. You can’t stop life when you are threatened by a dodgy person on the street, practice running for ten years, go back to reality and escape. Once threatened, if you are not capable of running, your chances of getting away is very slim. So what one does throughout his life, is continuously improving their bodily and mental capacity, and prepare himself for such situations, as a result, picking the maximum gain in each event. We continuously increase our mastery of interactions with our environment.
We constantly find and consume counterfactual scenarios from our environment. We watch lots of movies, read books, read poetry, learn about lots of different scenarios of dramas and tragedies, and brainstorm about what we would do in those circumstances. These all prepare us for an endless combinational variety of puzzles that we might need to solve throughout our lives. Some very critical, some just daily routine.
We do all these digestions subconsciously but yet enthusiastically, generally without an actual conscious aim. We just “love” doing it. And well, love is generally accompanied by an evolutional, subconscious use. The level of consciousness that we have for this use, only lets us to drive the intrinsic enthusiasm in a more productive way. We practice as a side effect of our curiosity. We are curious because we have to prepare for endless possibilities of the future, in order to adapt to the unforeseeable.
Games
Wittgenstein is famous for his “language games” (Sprachspiel). What he says is; we can’t just read meaning of a word and completely master it. We have to play all games that the word of interest can involve in. We have to try all different combinations that it can be used in, in all different contexts. Meanwhile we try these different cases, we get better and better at using it.
This is what we see as “human nature”, but it is actually the way that intelligence works in general. We can’t always have ultimate, concrete aims and seek them consciously. That would mean we would always need concrete goals, otherwise just suspend ourselves and sit on a corner doing nothing. (Don’t get me wrong here, having goals and purposes that define those goals is a good thing, but we can’t have them as an absolute necessity for action) As an example, you can’t have a goal of “Understanding the word ‘concrete’ %100”, list all possible cases and start practicing like you are learning language with an app. If you try to define such a concrete goal, you will get bored after a while, because you won’t be able to come up with that list of exhaustive cases, and you won’t be able to track down what you are doing.
Instead of ultimate, well defined goals, in many cases we have what we can call as interests which is directed towards the encountered interesting. If not, the interests might also produce the interesting, rather than waiting for an encounter. Interesting is something that we haven’t done, we haven’t seen before. It is something that might help us understand something that we couldn’t understand before. We call this constant chase of the interesting as curiosity. At some moment, once we discover the connections, we might connect the dots and bring those interesting findings together and make them useful. Not always, but most of the time interesting implicitly promises us a use as its possible outcome.
When you just have the curiosity and practice your language skills as part of the daily routine, like the sand paradox, you will have one grain of sand every time you practice something, and ten years later those grains will form a pile of sand, that you would never guess you would be able to pile up. Though nobody can ever fully learn something, learning is a process without an actual end. It stops when you get the illusion of perfection, because for you there is no room left for improvement. Curiosity is an endless journey, it keeps us alive and kicking.
Anytime somebody shows you a weird way of using your hand, you get excited and try to do it. If one says he is able to blink only right or left eye, everybody will try to see if they can do it themselves. We constantly try to master the way that we can use our voice, our fingers, our body. We don’t have an ultimate goal while doing those, we just like the moment that we realize we are doing something new.
You would like to be able to stay in balance only using one foot, extending arms forward and the other leg back. This is where we start chasing mastery in dance for no ultimate goal. You would also like to turn while doing that. You could try lots of different combinations with your body, but what would be even more exciting? Doing balance games with another person. You could practice peaceful games with dance, or self-defence games with martial arts. Once you start, you will want to become better and better in it, because there is an inner voice that tells you, “You can always become better”.
Back to Counterfactuals
We were talking about stories, movies, novels right? They are actually simulations, created by individuals to investigate different scenarios. The counterfactuals let us depict different implementations of an abstract fact, and study the abstract fact within different contexts. You wouldn’t be able to convince an evil person about friendship, courage and justice, but you could make them watch and enjoy Star Wars. Their agreement on the scenario, is actually an implicit way of having them agree with the victory of these values. It is easier to agree, because they are not garmented with the burden of the conditions that they have in the real world. It is easier to be objective when you are not a subject. Feeding them with enough training data, they might eventually end up changing their ideas subconsciously.
But one can not simply investigate counterfactual worlds without the help of visual arts. You have to master the art of painting, so that you could visualize an impossible geometry, or a mythological creature. By mastering painting, you also improve yourself in a way that you can now perceive the world in a more analytical way, you understand the spatial space, and you can actively and consciously understand the geometrical shapes of the world.
If you understand the geometrical shapes of the world, you could continue mastering your perception and skills on creativity on the subject of counterfactuals by extending your skills on sculpture. You could start working on the inner depths of how a body is exactly shaped, and try to trick the human mind by using the way that it perceives the world. Maybe shape the stone in a way that it feels like there is a transparent veil between a body and the eye of the observer.
Mastering all these, it is possible to create parallel worlds, and make them as real as it is possible under their own terms, resolving possible conflicts within its own rules. It is much easier to discuss things when they are visualized and made concrete real parts of the world, since we are thinking in the world of ideas that we create, but events that are the source of truth take place in the world of time and spatiality.
Robots?
Well, given the fact that we are trying to find out ways of making robots work with body extensions, walk, run, carry things in warehouses, wouldn’t it make sense to teach them how to keep themselves in balance in any circumstances? What could possibly be easier than just teaching them how to dance? Actually, as time passes, the AI people started programming their robots to dance. Because it was easier to try out edge cases of self-balancing while doing acrobacy, rather than only trying to make them walk in hard terrain. Dancing poses a much greater variety of edge cases that can be mastered for balance games. Therefore, it is natural for the robots to dance, since it is an area that they also need to master, and continue mastering by themselves, to the farthest point they can go.
If we want the AI to also think and find things itself, AI will also have to be able to mimic the world, by creating its own simulations, and trying its own ideas against the parallel universes, counterfactual worlds that they create. This would mean they would also need to be able to draw, paint and sculpt (or 3D print?), if not at least have replacements for these (3D modelling, rendering), so that they could have a way of fully actualizing and working on the details of their own simulations, and also be able to present it to other intelligent forms so that various implementation of abstract ideas could be propagated, or at least, they could have the feedback loop between different intelligent forms in a way that they could continuously improve them.
The perception, and investigating its depths is a very important aspect of intelligence. You would want to know if there is a way that you might be seeing things in the way that they are not. You would want to know if hearing a voice that resembles birds make you have direct associations with nature, therefore you feel a positive sentiment, meanwhile it actually might be coming from a threatening source. Or you would like to investigate, or recall the stances that you have when you hear such a voice, so that you could go deep into your stances, and try to understand what they consist of. You would like to be able to master the way that you recall, redirect, maybe even manipulate those stances. This is how and why you do music. And there is no reason that a non-humane (not inhumane) intelligent form wouldn’t want to do the same thing. It is a mastery, and the motivation of study arises from the curiosity of the internal/external dynamics.
Therefore, for all these reasons, art, that we always took for granted as humane, is actually just intelligent.
