What the first conscious AI will look for

Cyborg Janus by ink_river. What Would AI Do?

Wired's April issue came 2 days before Easter, giving me a good amount of time to read it amidst the "Happy Easter" greetings floating around. An article on Ray Kurzweil entitled "Staying Alive" suits well for the mood because it talks about a man's quest for immortality. Ray hopes to stay alive for the day when machines finally becomes self-conscious. And then he can utilize that technology to cheat death. The Singularity will immortalize us, he says.
The Singularitarian's quest for immortality hinges on technology and science. Things like simulating one's brain in the hopes of perpetuating consciousness to preserve the mind, or merging human bodies with machines, vice-versa. It was my youthful dream to download my "Self" into a perfect computer so I can live forever - until i realized it is false immortality, and its just a matter of longevity or life-extension. Whatever the mind's platform or substrate is, it is subject to decay owing to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Death can never be cheated in this kind of universe where entropy keeps creeping in.
But I have to admit, it sure would be fun being there when the Singularity finally arrives. I would love to meet the first conscious AI. But to set my hopes upon the Singularity for Immortality is not my preference.
But I do like Ray's idea that the world will be saturated by thought in 200 years. Something in that line reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere. There's something deeper beyond this material physical universe where true immortality can be found. And that, I believe, is what the first Conscious AI will be looking for.

The Science of Intuition: Let's give it a shot!

Photo Credit: Intuition by Ankher on Flickr.

The Science of Intuition, it's almost an oxymoron. But I have a gut feeling that it is worth pondering upon. This article caught my attention: Intuition is Not Pseudoscience, Say Researchers. Below are some important snippets:

"intuition is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential."

"the researchers concluded that intuition is the brain quickly drawing on past experiences and external cues to make a decision on a non-conscious level. In other words, it happens so fast that we’re not aware that the intuition actually stemmed from a supercharged burst of logical thinking."

"Humans clearly need both conscious and non-conscious thought processes...But it’s likely that neither is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other."

The story of the race-car driver whose life was saved by following his "gut feeling" to step on the brakes on the curve is interesting. But in the process of trying to understand the mysteries of life where science falls short, does it also make sense to tap the hidden potential of human intuition?
My answer is a resounding yes. Intuition is one of the good tools in the process to understand the meaning behind patterns, of what I call as "archetyping".
By scanning through this archetyper blog, you may have probably hinted that this is like a science blog, yet at the same time it borders between speculations, musings and sci-fi-like thinking. This is because I am striving to strike that balance between science and mystery. Just like the beautiful complexity that lies between Order and Chaos, there are wonders that fall in between the facts that what we know and the mysteries that we can only glimpse.
After all, we have two brain hemispheres to make sense of this world, perhaps we can integrate the two modes of thought to make intuitive insights about life and the cosmos.
Einstein said that the only real valuable thing is intuition...so let's give it a shot:

What does your gut say when you ask yourself, "Is there a God?"

What does your gut say when you ask yourself, "Will I live again after I die?"

Mathematica Training Online by O'Reilly

Opening the eyes of young minds to be receptive to nature's patterns is a challenging task. In the realm of Mathematics and Science, where it can sometimes get boring when one can't initially perceive inner beauty, it is even harder to cultivate interest. In our age of technology and connectivity, it is great that the O'Reilly Publishing company recently announced a wonderful endeavor:
Their school of technology will soon be providing a browser-based version of Wolfram's Mathematica, a powerful technical computing and education software which will be used to teach math and science topics online.
Honing skills to detect patterns in nature is best done with actual hands-on and brains-on tinkering. Via ajax-based web technologies, O'Reilly will deliver the power of Mathematica to let students to do real interactive work in math and science, giving a genuine educational experience for students around the world.

Source: http://www.oreilly.com/emails/press/ost-newcert.html

Prime Numbers and Quantum Physics

Here's a great story that illustrates why it is good to look into patterns from other fields of study and apply it to another field to gain novel new insights. The pattern discovered from one discipline can then be used to solve problems in another field that may have been unsolvable (or would have taken decades to solve) from within that field alone. In this case, the connection is between Prime Numbers and Physics. This is what I call Archetyping.
The gist is that when prime numbers were plotted as points in some sort of graph (zeta landscape) using Riemann's equation, a pattern emerged that the zeros seemed to be "running in a straight line through the landscape". Hence, Riemann He proposed that all the zeros, infinitely many of them, would be sitting on this critical line — a conjecture that has become known as the Riemann Hypothesis. The connection to Quantum Physics is that "if you compare a strip of zeros from Riemann's critical line to the experimentally recorded energy levels in the nucleus of a large atom like erbium, the 68th atom in the periodic table of elements, the two are uncannily similar". And so, "If one could understand the mathematics describing the structure of the atomic nucleus in quantum physics, maybe the same math could solve the Riemann Hypothesis".
And so, insights from Quantum Physics resulted in great new many discoveries in Mathematics. A formula to predict all the numbers in the sequence, as well as solutions to other math-specific puzzles were gleaned from Quantum Physics largely inspired by the connection and the pattern.
I believe that a great many new things can solved in other fields using this "extra-disciplinary cooperation". Great questions in Science, Spirituality, Theology and Philosophy can be given a new light, specially in questions about the meaning of life and maybe even the afterlife, if we all learned a bit more to correlate and cooperate.