Aleksandr Segal

The star in the night that sits alone

A brown leaf that blows through the street on its own

The tales that migrate by word and tome

All is great that comes with with the northern wind

There was almost interest in me to actively create art but never the motivated initiative to follow through. Typical high school poetry meetings and art classes were far more important for my social life than for my creative outlet. Once I began doing philosophy, I still spent time pondering art and its mystical characteristics. The history of art and the way in which it progresses seemed too simple to be so evasive – but I knew with guarantee that contextual knowledge of art was imperative to having an active role in its evolution.

Well, today I lack much of this contextual knowledge but I have at last taken a step towards trying to actually make something that may (or may not) be considered art. I purchased a Canon EOS 40D DSLR. It was used and purchased from eBay but it operates beautifully. With it, I also purchased two lenses: the “nifty-fifty” EF 50mm f/1.8 II, and the “kit” EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS. Additionally, I also got a cleaning kit and a Caselogic SLRC-205 SLR Camera Sling bag. To top it all off. a friend gifted me a Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash.

I didn’t know what to expect from my first venture into photography. I think I may have actually expected to abandon the hobby altogether within a couple of weeks. (Which could turn out to be the case, but let’s hope not!) In my excitement, I also began using an old Russian Zenit ET 35mm camera that I had lying around. Find my photos here.

Some photos (so far):

IBM has created a supercomputer with enough processing power for “real-time cortical simulation that achieved more than 1 billion spiking neurons, as well as 10 trillion individual learning synapses” exceeding the capacity of a cat’s brain. The technology is predicted to come as close as ever to replicating the human brain by 2019. This, of course, is the foreshadowing of many marvelous possibilities such as the creation of sentient artificial intelligence or the ability to save a person’s mind within a computer system. All of these issues are clearly subject to debate and these arguments are too plenty and substantial for this blog entry but are definitely worthy of perusing.

One issue is especially interesting to me however. That is, the creative power of man over a potentially intelligent being. I think it is worthy of considering the ethical repercussions of being part of a creator-creation relationship. These supercomputers, assuming they are truly intelligent, are intended to be a useful gadget of mankind. Would this then be a slave-master relationship? Is it ethically allowable to create an intelligent agent, biologically present or not, with a specific intended use? First, and foremost, it should be explored whether a supercomputer such as the one built by IBM could actually be “intelligent”. Achieving a brain-like neuron system replication is clearly within reach but this offers little information on whether a computer could have the same mind-like states of a human. The capacity for memory, learning, and decision making is not necessarily tied to the experience of these traits. Perhaps experience is not essential for being a being in the same scope as humans. Other characteristics are also important including free will or emotion. A neural system reproduction is capable of learning and memory but it is not clear as to whether the computer will be able to transcend the user input of the programmer in its output.

These problems can be highlighted by examining the human brain and how a person makes decisions. When faced with a decision, such as what food to eat, a person will typically base his decision on past experience. For instance, if I were to find a mushroom that, in the past, has made me ill, I will probably avoid it. For a computer, decisions can, too, be based on past occurrences but will, ultimately, depend on the foundation of programming that the computer began with. This programming will be the basis for how the computer learns and how it interprets information. So, would a computer, even a supercomputer of near-human capabilities in neural networking, be free from the programmer’s directions?

To return to my original idea of the relationship between the creation and the creator, it is interesting to consider what it means to create an intelligent agent with intended use in mind prior to its existence. In some ways, people have done just this for quite some time with some-what intelligent animals for a wide variety of useful purposes. However, the dilemma of artificial intelligence is a more curious case since this would be the creation of a an entirely new type of being – a being that rises above and beyond the physical form and only depends on a stream of information.