I’ve been thinking about birds and artificial intelligence

My current project is to write an extended series of Bedtime Stories for Emerging Artificial Intelligences. I have been giving a lot of thought over the last few years to the existential and ethical/human dimensions of AI, and the creatures we could manufacture if we actually achieved artificial consciousness in an embodied form. Making intelligent creatures that wander around the world: there is something to explore in that. What would they think? What would they do? What might they say to us? I remain endlessly curious about this.

I’m not really concerned with whether we get to self-aware AI infused robots in a hurry or not - I am happy to speculate. The potential to create gods and/or monsters, or even bipedal bird-headed creatures as per Ernst’s famous collage novels is at the front of my mind, and I also remain fascinated by the relationship between discovery and invention, creativity and destruction.

Three quotes to muse on:

_“Many cultures produce a wealth of data about themselves in the form of written stories… written to inform, educate, or to entertain. Regardless of their purpose, stories are necessarily reflections of the culture and society that they were produced in. Stories encode many types of sociocultural knowledge: commonly shared knowledge, social protocols, examples of proper and improper behaviour, and strategies for coping with adversity._”

“_We believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, “reverse engineer” the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them. These values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces. Further, we believe this can be done in a way that compels an intelligent entity to adhere to the values of a particular culture.”_

- Mark O. Riedl & Brent Harrison, “Using stories to teach human values to Artificial Agents”, 02016, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

_"In the literary arts, those antique categories of expression…were resuscitated…under conditions of absolute doubt - with the understanding that, as long as doubt remained an agency, and the written text it entailed affirmed that doubt, it could neither disintegrate into despair nor transcend into monadic assurance, but would remain, instead, always an absolute permission."_

- Misquote: After David Hickey, "Richter in Tahiti"", Parkett 35, 82-83, 01993, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

_“I foresee something dreadful…Man be cause to something that is no longer human…”_

_“…I could not spare anything as I created… All your evil and error, your falsehood and ignorance—it’s all in his seed.”_

- Friedrich Nietzsche, 01882-01883, Genoa, Italy