Novelty is Not Dead: What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Us About Discovery - Design 4 Emergence

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, discovery algorithms… At this stage of human development we find ourselves gazing at a fantastic horizon, one where we have the opportunity to design intelligent entities -- robot brains. Will we design them in the image of our own neural networks? In today's research landscape, scientists are giving robots resilience and adaptability, deep learning and long-term modular memory. They're asking AI to perform complex tasks not so much with efficiency in mind as novelty. And guess what: it may change how we think about not only evolution, but the way we ourselves, as a network of individuals and organizations, approach innovation. Will we design for efficiency, our minds on reaching a fixed set of desired objectives -- or will we design for resilience, adaptability… emergence? We spoke with Jeff Clune of the Evolving AI Lab about how some of the emergent effects of machine learning are taking AI in a direction we didn't expect… and what it could potentially teach us about ourselves. Jeff's work has not gone unnoticed. He's been cited in Wired, the Atlantic, Nature, and Scientific American, to name a few.