Max is NOW!

Recently I have been considering the theories, ideas, and some writings that surround Artificial Intelligence and the replication of human-like consciousness outside of an actual human instantiation. Of course, when I say “Artificial Intelligence,” I’m not talking about some solid monolith of theory, or of even defining the word itself. In some schools of thought Artificial Intelligence is as simple as a vacuum cleaner that can navigate itself and know when to clean the floor, while in other schools of thought Artificial Intelligence is defined as being something that is more akin to the human intelligence.
My following thoughts, while short at this time, are more about the replication of human consciousness or intelligence, rather than the forms of logical decision probability and so on as in the AI vacuum cleaners and conversation robots.
So here I go shortly.

The two terms “digital” and “analog”(analogue) have been on my mind recently. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ll start thinking about the differences between the two and the way that digital technologies have shaped and changed our lives in this socioeconomic sphere. You can see it in everything from Television to Telephones to Printed Materials. For instance, with cellular phones, they have shifted from analog to digital platforms of cell transmission. The “older” analog method, which ate up bandwidth and thus cost more to utilize, has been replaced by shrunk-down digital technology, which requires far less bandwidth and can be transmitted as packets and other various methods rather than an open connection.
A fairly easy way to understand this difference elsewhere would be with music. The comparison would be between an old vinyl record album and a new compact disc album. It’s the same music, and sometimes even mastered and originally recorded in the same method, but their formats are significantly different. The vinyl album is basically a microscopic mountain-range created by pressing the vinyl to reflect the waveforms emitted by the music. This compares drastically to the compact disc, which is digitized into millions or billions of 1s and 0s, then represented as a translation of these ones and zeros by your CD player or computer or what have you. I think the most apparent difference between these methods is about the nature of their consistency among the album made in the same manner. What I mean here is that the CD album will sound the same across all production of CD albums, in that it is never remastered, so that one can buy twenty versions of the CD and listen to them all for dozens of years and never be able to tell the difference between any of the CDs barring superficial scratching or manufacturing error. Now whereas the CDs will all be the same, the vinyl albums will only be similar. Because of the very nature in the way in which the vinyl albums are created, none are ever the same, the are only similar. I could buy two vinyl album recordings of Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, an incredible album by the way, and both of those albums would sound different. Not in large ways, but over time I could hear and feel the differences in each vinyl pressing. So, the conclusion would be that while the digital method of compact discs is about sameness, the analog conditions of vinyl albums would be much more about similarity and not sameness.

Now, this is where my short thought about recreating human intellect or consciousness enters. The human mind seems to be more of a method that operates in the analog manner, whereas computers and machines operate in the digital manner. Computers, or I should say largely “computations” themselves require sameness because of their digital nature. Much like the world seems to be and our minds seem to be, analog is messy. It’s not about definite limitations and finite computation. Analog is about the big picture, it’s about being messy but still transferring the message. Digital is about exactness, its about absolute clarity.
And this would seem to be the first problem of computer and mechanistic intellect being able to recreate a human intellect, that the computer or machine cannot navigate messiness for the bigger picture. If your computer has a corrupted file, it doesn’t give you the window that says, “the file basically said ’so and so,’” and the vacuum doesn’t try to go through objects that it learned were there the first time.

Digital is about sameness.
Analog is about similarity.