Aviva Rutkin reports for NewScientist (10 October 2015, paywall) on the creation of a marine robot with a sense of curiosity:
At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, computer scientist Yogesh Girdhar is figuring out how to imbue bots with a sense of curiosity. He wants them to be able to filter out the more common features, and focus on the remarkable.
The curiosity software starts running the minute the robot is dropped into a new place. It has little information about what the world looks like initially, but slowly begins making sense of what it sees by searching for patterns in the data. In the ocean, those patterns represent things like sand, kelp or fish. …
Underwater, AQUA looked “like a puppy”, Girdhar says, racing and eagerly sniffing at new or unusual sights. In one set of tests, it successfully wandered over to check out nearby sea plants and corals, spending less time on bare patches of sand.
While Yogesh talks about curiosity, it’s not much different from purpose. This collides with a latent sense of collective purpose I occasionally muse upon: the old question of what are we doing here? For millenia, the answer was simply to survive long enough to multiply.
Then we began to seek understanding, once it became clear that understanding enhanced the chances to survive. Sometimes, understanding took to the creation of the notion of Gods; it was simply too hard to come up with anything more realistic.
Then we moved on to nationalism. I’m reminded of an entry in T. E. Lawrence’s Selected Letters, which I shall not dig out as I read it many years ago and can only hope my copy is upstairs (and it’s quite large), in which, upon learning that he’s lost a brother (or was it two?) in the fighting in the trenches of France, he laments that they have had the honor of dying for their country; by implicit contrast, he has not. So their purpose was to serve the nation.
Nowadays? Sometimes it seems like we are in a knowledge acquisition mode, frantically building and tearing down models of the world at various scales, confident in … what? What is the purpose of the acquisition of all this knowledge?
The fly in my soup, I suspect, is attributing singletary purposes to a group of people. We are individuals. We, at least in the United States, are taught to follow our own interests – at least to some extent. And, yet, I cannot help noticing how much the Millenials’ constant use of smartphones resembles a distributed computing project, frantically calculating … what?
Are we really just an arm of some otherworldly octopus, mere neurons in its exploratory arm? Or a computer simulation?
Which brings us back to the robot’s curiosity. While I’m fascinated by the thought of a robot flicking from new experience, or pattern, to another, I keep in mind that it didn’t develop that curiosity, but was programmed to do it; it’s not a survival urge, but just another knowledge acquisition strategy developed by its builders. And what does that mean?
