Creativity and Artificial Intelligence (was Capitalism, Scar
DOUG.BAILEY@ey.com
Mon, 2 Feb 1998 13:45:00 -0500
The statement was made that in a future where MNT reached its full potential
(as described by Drexler) that the only commodity (scarce resource) would be
creativity. I am not comfortable with this statement. The underlying
assumption in the statement is artificial intelligence will not be able to be
creative. I am not a cognition expert but I am not so sure that we should
attribute creativity exclusively to humans. As I undestand it, we do not have
a thorough understanding of how creativity works. If this is the case I think
it is premature to assume that artificial intelligence in the future will not
be able to be creative.
This entire issue gets back to the strong AI/weak AI issue. I believe this is
the most significant issue when speculating on how the future will look. If
creativity is a computable problem, meaning if it could be manifested by some
algorithm, then even weak AI could be creative. If creativity is some result
of brain functions entirely alien to computation then it is still possible that
it could result from the cognitive activities of a strong AI entity. Thus it
appears its possible that in a MNT future that creativity could be a commodity
but only in a weak AI future where creativity turns out to be a noncomputable
function.
Doug Bailey
doug.bailey@ey.com