Tag Archives: imagination

Imagination is your superpower

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About a year ago I wrote an update on the hype around AI [see ‘Update on position of AI on hype curve: it cannot dream’ on July 26th, 2023].  Gartner’s hype curve has a ‘peak of inflated expectations’, followed by a ‘trough of disillusionment’ then an upward ‘slope of enlightenment’ leading to a ‘plateau of productivity’ [see ‘Hype cycle’ on September 23rd 2015].  It is unclear where AI is on the hype curve.  Tech companies are still pretty excited about it and advertising is beginning to claim that all sorts of products are augmented by AI.  Maybe there is a hint of unfulfilled expectations which suggest being on the downward slope towards a trough of disillusionment; however, these analyses can really only be performed retrospectively.  It is clear that we can create algorithms capable of artificial generative intelligence which can accomplish levels of creativity similar to a human in a specific task.  However, we cannot create artificial general intelligence that can perform like a human across a wide range of tasks and achieve sentience.  Current artificial intelligence algorithms consume our words, images and decisions to replay them to us.  Shannon Vallor has suggested that AI algorithms are ‘giant mirrors made of code’ and that ‘these mirrors know no more of the lived experience of thinking and feeling than our bedroom mirrors know our inner aches and pains’.  The challenge facing us is that AI will make us lazy and that we will lose the capacity to think and solve new problems creatively.  Instead of making myself a cup of coffee and sitting down to gather my thoughts and dream up a short piece for this blog, I could have put the title into ChatGPT and the task would have been done in about two minutes.  I just did and it told me that imagination is a truly powerful force that fuels creativity, innovation and problem-solving allowing us to envision new possibilities, create stories and invent technologies.  Imagination is the key to unlocking potential and driving progress.  This is remarkably similar to parts of an article in the FT newspaper on November 25, 2023 by Martin Allen Morales titled ‘We need imagination to realise the good, not just stave off the bad’.  What is missing from the ChatGPT version is the recognition that imagination is a human superpower and without it we have no hope of ever achieving anything beyond what already exists.

Sources

Becky Hogge, Through the looking glass, FT Weekend, May 29, 2024.

Martin Allen Morales, We need imagination to realise the good, not just stave off the bad, FT Weekend, November 25, 2023.

Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, OUP, April, 2024.

Limits of imagination

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What’s it like being a bat?  ‘Seeing’ the world through your ears, or at least a sophisticated echo-location system. Or, what’s it like being an octopus?  With eight semi-autonomous arms that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago [see ‘Intelligent aliens?’ on January 16th, 2019]. For most of us, it’s unimaginable. Perhaps, because we are not bats or octopuses, but that seems to be dodging the issue.  Is it a consequence of our education and how we have been taught to think about science?  Most scientists have been taught to express their knowledge from a third person perspective that omits the personal point of view, i.e. our experience of science.  The philosopher, Julian Baggini has questioned the reason for this mode of expression: is it that we haven’t devised a framework for understanding the world scientifically that captures the first and third person points of view; is it that the mind will always elude scientific explanation; or is that the mind simply isn’t part of the physical world?

Our minds have as many neurons as there are stars in the galaxy, i.e. about a hundred billion, which is sufficient to create complex processes within us that we are never likely to understand or predict.  In this context, Carlo Rovelli has suggested that the ideas and images that we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us.  So, if we struggle to describe our own consciousness, then perhaps it is not surprising that we cannot express what it is like to be a bat or an octopus.  Instead we resort to third person descriptions and justify it as being in the interests of objectivity.  But, does your imagination stretch to how much greater our understanding would be if we did know what is like to be a bat or an octopus?  And, how that might change our attitude to the ecosystem?

BTW:  I would answer yes, yes and maybe to Baggini’s three questions, although I remain open-minded on all of them.

Sources:

Baggini J, The pig that wants to be eaten and 99 other thought experiments, London: Granta Publications, 2008.

Rovelli C, Seven brief lessons on physics, London, Penguin Books. 2016.

Image: https://www.nps.gov/chis/learn/nature/townsends-bats.htm