Intertwined Intelligences

Dear friend,

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I hope this letter finds you well. This morning, while sipping on a too hot, too bitter, too early, cup of coffee, I came across an article about large language models (LLMs) that stirred my curiosity. It spoke of how these machines surpass mere imitation, displaying hundreds of emergent abilities, many unrelated to text analysis.

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The article intrigued me, and so I delved into the history of emergence. It's a fascinating subject. In 1875, George Henry Lewes wrote, "The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." A century later, Jeffrey Goldstein defined it as "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems."

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While exploring, I found that emergence and reductionism are at odds. Reductionism breaks things down into simpler components, but emergence tells us that new properties emerge from the interactions of these parts. Consider what Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, says, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. I am not a reductionist in any philosophical sense, but it seems to me that our increased understanding of the universe has led to a certain simplification, in that we can now see how laws that work at different levels of complexity can all be derived from more fundamental laws."

Great minds have grappled with these concepts in various fields. Murray Gell-Mann, who inspired me deeply, once said, "Emergence, the idea that new properties and laws can emerge at higher levels of complexity, is central to many scientific fields, including my own, the physics of complex adaptive systems." Stuart Kauffman, another one of those giants, declared, "Self-organization is the spontaneous often seemingly purposeful formation of spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal structures or functions in systems composed of few or many components."

In physics, David Bohm, a - or should I say - the theoretical physicist, emphasized the ever-changing nature of everything, while Ilya Prigogine, who worked on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, revealed how new properties emerge with increasing complexity. In biology, Gerald Edelman suggested that consciousness itself is an emergent property of neural activity. And even sociology embraces emergence. Mark Granovetter argued that we cannot comprehend macroscopic phenomena by merely examining individual actions.

This brought me to consider the emergence of artificial intelligence, as seen in the LLMs that piqued my interest. Fran?ois Chollet, an AI researcher, posits that more general AIs will exhibit more emergent behaviors. Melanie Mitchell, another expert, believes that as AI systems grow, we can anticipate increasingly sophisticated emergent behaviors, some of which may surprise us.

Chollet writes, "As AI systems become more general and capable, they will need to develop their own internal representations of the world, rather than relying on human-designed features. This will likely lead to more emergent behaviors as the system discovers new patterns and connections in the data it is processing," and Mitchell writes, "Emergent phenomena are a hallmark of complex systems, and AI systems are nothing if not complex. As these systems become more sophisticated and interconnected, we can anticipate increasingly sophisticated emergent behaviors, some of which may be beneficial and some of which may be unexpected or even dangerous." You know, I am not sure what to make of this.

While pondering these thoughts, I wondered if combining AI and human intelligence could lead to new forms of collective intelligence, with breakthroughs beyond what either could achieve alone. The idea resonated with me, considering how intertwined we've become with technology and its potential to transform the way we think, create, and solve problems. I wasn't the first to entertain this notion, obviously. Thomas W. Malone, in his book "Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together", writes:

"As we create new ways for people and computers to work together closely, we will also be creating new kinds of human-computer systems—superminds—that can sometimes do things that neither the people nor the computers in them could do alone."

So, it seems my intelligence is not as unique as I thought! I could surely profit from an emergent ability here. Finishing my coffee, definitely too cold now, definitely too bitter now, I couldn't help but grin at the endless possibilities that await us in this interconnected world, where AI and humanity may co-create a reality beyond our current understanding.

I've always loved progress, and yet, today, it terrifies me. It's an endless expanse of both hope and danger, a force that can bring peace to the soul or swallow you whole. Like many, I feel a mixture of excitement and anxiety when contemplating the future. I'm eager to see what the future holds, but I'm also nervous about the unknown and the possibility of disappointment.

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Until we meet again, my friend, I hope you find these thoughts as captivating as I do.

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Yours sincerely,

?L.?

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PS: If you have time, wander through the thoughts and ideas that inspired me to write this letter and breathe in their spirit.

• Ornes, S. (2023). The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models. Quanta Magazine. Quanta Magazine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/
• Lewes, G. H. (1875). Problems of Life and Mind. London: Truebner and Co.
• Goldstein, J. (1999). Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues, Emergence: Complexity and Organization 1 (1): 49–72.
• Weinberg, S. (1993). Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature. Vintage Books.
• Gell-Mann, M. (1994). The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. St. Martin's Press.
• Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press.
• Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. Bantam Books.
• Edelman, G. M. (2004). Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. Yale University Press.
• Granovetter, M. (1978). Threshold Models of Collective Behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 83(6), 1420-1443.
• Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf.
• Hidalgo, C. A. (2015). Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. Basic Books.
• Malone, T. W. (2018). Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. Little, Brown and Company.