Gigaom AI Minute – July 7

Transcript

Emergence is when a system takes on attributes that none of the components of it have. You, for instance, are made of a trillion or more cells, none of which have a sense of humor, but together you have a sense of humor because it is an emergent property.

You could, for instance, study oxygen and hydrogen for a year and never in your wildest imagination think that when you combine them you get something that is wet. However, once you know that you get water once you combine hydrogen and oxygen, you can kind of figure out how it happens and you say, "Oh, yes I see that now."

Some people believe that there is another kind of emergence, which is strong emergence. This would be where you can’t actually ever understand how the system gets the attributes it does from its components. It would almost be as if strong emergence is a fundamental force in the galaxy--something that is as basic as gravity, yet we don't understand the mechanism behind.

The reason this is relevant in artificial intelligence is that human-level intelligence appears to be emergent. It emerges from how your brain operates. Human consciousness is also thought, by some, to be an emergent phenomenon. If it is a strong emergent phenomenon, and some people think consciousness is the only example of it, then true intelligence and consciousness may not be possible in computers.