Tag Archives: innovation

Emergence of ideas leading to a lack of deep insights

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Decorative imageIn Surrealism, which emerged after World War 1, artists attempted to allow the subconscious mind to express itself and resulted in illogical montages or dreamlike scenes and ideas.  Some surrealists championed the subconscious because they thought it would release society from the oppressive rationality of capitalism.  Anna Wiele Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen has suggested that instead our subconscious has been colonised by capitalism and is being shaped the endless of streams of disconnected images flowing from our phones, which are as incongruous as any surrealist montage.  To decolonise our subconscious and to replenish our creativity many of us need a digital detox involving time away from our electronic devices [see ‘Digital detox with deep vacation’ on August 10th, 2016] allowing our brains to switch into mind wandering mode for long uninterrupted periods [see ‘Mind wandering’ on September 3rd, 2014].  Cormac McCarthy has described how ideas struggle against their own realisation and come with their own innate scepticism that acts like a steering mechanism for their emergence from our subconscious.  He also suggests that all ideas come to an end when they lose lustre becoming a tool, perhaps as a theory, strategy or plan, and you can no longer entertain the illusion that they hold some deep insight into reality.  Many of my thoughts never coalesce into an emergent idea but remain as illogical and disconnected as a surrealist montage and the few that do emerge don’t provide deep insights into reality that I recognise.

Sources:

Anya Harrison, Another Surrealism, 2022

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger, Pan MacMillan, 2023.

Jackie Wullschläge, Surrealism at 100: does it still have the power to disrupt?, FT Weekend, 27 January 2024.

Image: Ceramic tile by Pablo Picasso in museum in Port de Sóller Railway Station, Mallorca.

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.

Update on position of AI on hype curve: it cannot dream

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Decorative image of a flowerIt would appear that I was wrong in 2020 when I suggested that artificial intelligence was near the top of its hype curve [see ‘Where is AI on the hype curve?‘ on August 12th, 2020].  In the past few months the hype has reached new levels.  Initially, there were warnings about the imminent takeover of global society by artificial intelligence; however, recently the pendulum has swung back towards a more measured concern that the nature of many jobs will be changed by artificial intelligence with some jobs disappearing and others being created.  I believe that the bottom-line is that while terrific advances have been made with large language models, such as ChatGPT, artificial intelligence is artificial but it is not intelligent [see ‘Inducing chatbots to write nonsense‘ on February 15th, 2023].  It cannot dream.  It is not creative or inventive, largely because it is very powerful applied statistics which needs data based on what has happened or been produced already.  So, if you are involved in solving mysteries (ill-defined, vague and indeterminate problems) rather than puzzles [see ‘Puzzles and mysteries‘ on November 25th, 2020] then you are unlikely to be replaced by artificial intelligence in the foreseeable future [see ‘When will you be replaced by a computer?‘ on November 20th, 2019].  Not that you should trust my predictions of the future! [see ‘Predicting the future through holistic awareness‘ on January 6th, 2021]

Taking an aircraft’s temperature as a health check

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The title of this post is the title of a talk that I will deliver during the Pint of Science Festival in Liverpool later this month.  At last year’s festival I spoke about the very small: Revealing the invisible: real-time motion of virus particles [see ‘Fancy a pint of science‘ on April 27th, 2022].  This year I am moving up the size scale and from biomedical engineering to aerospace engineering to talk about condition monitoring in aircraft structures based on our recent research in the INSTRUCTIVE [see ‘INSTRUCTIVE final reckoning‘ on January 9th 2019] and DIMES [see ‘Our last DIMES‘ on September 22, 2021] projects.  I am going describe how we have reduced the size and cost of infrared instrumentation for monitoring damage propagation in aircraft structures while at the same time increasing the resolution so that we can detect 1 mm increments in crack growth in metals and 6 mm diameter indications of damage in composite materials.  If you want to learn more how we did it and fancy a pint of science, then join us in Liverpool later this month for part of the world’s largest festival of public science.  This year we have a programme of engineering talks on Hope Street in Frederiks on May 22nd and in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms on May 23rd where I be the second speaker.

The University of Liverpool was the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners were Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.  Strain Solutions Limited was the coordinator of the INSTRUCTIVE project in which the other participant was the University of Liverpool.  Airbus was the project manager for both projects.

The DIMES and INSTRUCTIVE projects  received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820951 and 6968777 respectively.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.