Computing

Discussion

the evolution of computation as a symbiosis of human and machine

Nathan Gardels:

“Across the sciences, we are coming to understand the self-organizing principle of “computation” as the building block of all forms of budding intelligence, from primitive cells to generative AI. This process involves learning from the environment, assembling information and arranging it by sharing functional instructions through “copying and pasting” code, so that an organism can develop, reproduce and sustain itself.

As Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika write in this issue, “computing existed in nature long before we built the first ‘artificial computers.’ … Understanding computing as a natural phenomenon will enable fundamental advances not only in computer science and AI, but also in physics and biology.”

More than half a century ago, they note, pioneering computer scientists had the intuition that organic and inorganic intelligence follow the same set of rules for development. “John von Neumann,” write the authors, “realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing those instructions.” The technical requirements for that “universal constructor” in nature — the tape-like instructions of DNA — “correspond precisely to the technical requirements for the earliest computers.”

“Life,” they continue, “is computational because its existence over time depends on growth, healing or reproduction, and computation itself must evolve to support these essential functions.”

Grasping the correspondence with natural computation and learning from it, they believe, will render AI “brainlike” as it further evolves along the path from mimicking neural computation to predictive intelligence, general intelligence and, ultimately, collective intelligence. “Brains, AI agents and societies can all become more capable through increased scale. However, size alone is not enough. Intelligence is fundamentally social, powered by cooperation and the division of labor among many agents.”

In short, as philosopher of technology Tobias Rees also argues in this issue, the evolution of computation as a symbiosis of human and machine will cause us to rethink what it means to be human as, for the first time in history, a “more than human” intelligence emerges on our planet.”

(https://www.noemamag.com/introducing-noema-vi-paradigm-shifts/)