"A new kind of Science". Wolfram. Don't leave home without it.
Seriously though. We talk about AI, but In My Opinion, the most powerful and interesting game changer is "Complex Adaptive Systems". I call them gestalts - the sum is greater than the parts because of how the parts interact to produce behaviors. Gestalts are all around us and we seem bizarrely unaware of them. Do you have some money? That means you are participating in a complex adaptive system or gestalt. Got cells? Perhaps you are a gestalt? Are you self aware? Does that mean you are a self aware gestalt, participating in other gestalts. Etc.
The difficult question is whether you (yes you personally) can build a gestalt. Can you take some pieces - entities - give them a set of rules and get them to do some accomplish a purpose.
That is the problem Wolfram was asking
The RIP router is a defunct example that has all the pieces. Entities + Ability to interact + rules => function.
I used to believe in the “sum is greater than the parts” bit, in the context of emergence etc, but then I’d realized it’s at odds with basic information theory: where does the information go? what computes these behaviors?
To me the answer is pretty clear: you’re outsourcing some of your storage and compute into the environment. Without a suitable substrate none of this would be possible.
Seriously though. We talk about AI, but In My Opinion, the most powerful and interesting game changer is "Complex Adaptive Systems". I call them gestalts - the sum is greater than the parts because of how the parts interact to produce behaviors. Gestalts are all around us and we seem bizarrely unaware of them. Do you have some money? That means you are participating in a complex adaptive system or gestalt. Got cells? Perhaps you are a gestalt? Are you self aware? Does that mean you are a self aware gestalt, participating in other gestalts. Etc.
The difficult question is whether you (yes you personally) can build a gestalt. Can you take some pieces - entities - give them a set of rules and get them to do some accomplish a purpose. That is the problem Wolfram was asking
The RIP router is a defunct example that has all the pieces. Entities + Ability to interact + rules => function.
Oh, and don't forget to vote.