Before leaning towards the actual topic, let’s talk something about Creativity, What is Creativity? Dictionary say’s
“Creativity is a mental process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.”
Creativity is the most natural cognitive process happening in almost all human minds. We can safely count even those minds that lurk in asylums or those that are lying on the hospital beds in conscious or unconscious sleep because physical manifestation of the creativity is never a condition here. As long as there is mind, there is bound to be ever flowing river of thoughts and ideas inside it, realizable or unrealizable, real or virtual, sane or insane doesn’t really matter.
Leaving aside the definitions, normal folks understand the word creativity in little different angle. We acknowledge Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Jimmy Page’s guitar solo as being creative thing. The word creativity is so much copyrighted by the musicians and artists that we generally never attribute this word with several other things that genuinely deserve this praise. Say for instance, the law of gravity by Newton. Is it not the most creative thing ever materialized? A boring formula and a mathematical equation are creative? You must be joking!
But consider this definition given by Francis Crick of creative act. The creative act he says is the dramatic feeling of the sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.
Well is it not same thing happening everywhere? Da Vinci must have experienced this sudden enlightenment when he saw Mona Lisa on one fine morning, or a rocker guitarist must have felt it after one sleepless night at the studio (or perhaps after a strong dose of cocaine!) and no doubt Mr. Newton experienced this sudden rush of thoughts when the apple fell on his head.
Cognitive process is same in all the cases. However if you try to decipher this process which actually leads to the creative output you wont find this an easy enlightenment though. But now since we are already dwelling on the subject lets go deeper still.
At every moment of our existence, we are forever sensing the environment around us (even the environment within us). All these sensations generate emotions in our mind. Some emotions momentarily shine like fire crackers while some remain longer still. These emotions then catch our attention and direct our intellect to find associations between all the emotions that are lying in our mind’s pool. If more and more associations are found then they become ideas. Ideas join together to create a desire. The desires generate motivation and these motivations finally bring about the action.
Don’t sweat! We were just describing the most normal everyday event of you leaving your computer desk fetching a glass of water and drinking it.
You felt the sensation of dropping water level inside your body, that sensory signal generated an emotion inside your mind. This emotion got associated with that emotion generated inside you when you saw water jug in the kitchen few hours ago or when you saw the a glass of water on your desk couple of seconds ago. These emotions generated the idea of you actually leaving your seat and fetching the jug or if you are big brother in your house to majestically order your kid brother to get you a glass of water and these ideas when matured into a desire finally motivated you to take the action which was materialized inside your mind.
Believe it or not all this happened inside you in a stretch of nanoseconds, and we are sure it is still happening inside you at this very moment (unless of course if you are dead!)
Attaching emotions and generating ideas is an intellectual process though. It gets gradually evolved inside you. A baby is able to only cry when feeling thirsty, while grown ups are able to find the water source and drink from it. It takes a formidable effort to generate idea from loose emotions and even more still to bring about the ultimate action from these ideas. It’s a constant evolution happening inside every human; very few are able to control these emotions and generate ideas and actions at will and become stronger in the society. While most of the people only end up dreaming, this refers to nothing but those ideas that are never realized by any external action.
Science calls this phenomenon as Emotional Intelligence.
It is a programmer’s dream to build an emotionally intelligent computer. And like the term dream we explained earlier it is still an idea not realized yet.
Why should a machine be allowed to be emotionally intelligent? Is it not machine’s virtue to be emotionless?
The answer is yes and no. Yes, in cases where machine is designed for problem domain successfully demarcated by fixed formulas or established probabilities. An emotionless machine will do exceedingly better than emotional human counterpart in multiplying and dividing hundred digits numbers or normalizing gigabytes of data to some pattern using established procedures but it’s a different ball game when those problems which have absolutely no fixed solutions arrive. Identifying the problem in the situation is even further than this.
Although the machines have almost overcame the certainties of this world and are rapidly conquering the probabilities their encounter with uncertainties of the world is still in early stages. To tackle uncertainties we need emotional intelligence.
The most natural go ahead is that we need “consciousness” for emotional intelligence. Someone must be conscious of emotions in order to understand them and that ‘someone’ got to be the machine. How to create consciousness? There are some interesting contemporary researches to ponder upon.
Notable are MIT’s KISMET project and LIDA model of Memphis University. (See Cognitive Architectures.)
The LIDA model is based on GWT theory (You must be emotionally attached to these short forms to grasp their true meaning!). Well, GWT stands for “Global Workspace Theory”. The theory assumes that consciousness is associated with global workspace, which is “A fleeting memory capacity whose focal contents are widely distributed (broadcast) to many unconscious specialized networks”.
In programmer’s sense, the GWT theory tries to create one global workspace memory, which is fully connected to the whole system and this memory (i.e. the contents of the memory are correlated with the whole system behavior) is used as input to other memories which are controlling subsystems and which are not aware of the whole system, (i.e. this subsystem’s memory is not correlated with the behavior of the whole system).
The GWT theory in a way tries to model the mind.
The only problem with the LIDA architecture (which is perhaps the implementation of GWT so far) is that although for an external audience, the actions of humanoid built on LIDA will look highly conscious of the internal(of other body organs) and external(of outside body) environments however, one cannot firmly say the same if the working is witnessed internally.
For example, say we created a ‘smiling robot’ based on LIDA. This robot of ours has say two specialized subsystems, one is voice recognition & interaction system and other is a system for controlling facial expression of the robot’s plastic face. This smiling robot of ours, gives a smile and says “Hello, nice to meet you” when he hears an unknown voice.
Using LIDA this can be done really elegantly and for external viewer it would seem like the smiling robot is really happy and smiling to you us as we an unknown is talking to him. But would it be same if you were looking at the internals of its working? I doubt it would be same. Because internally the face system was just trying to coordinate with the voice system, there was no evidence that Mr. Smile was actually ‘happy’ to hear from you.
The problem arising here is because the process of emotional intelligence is never equivalent to input > process > output paradigm of the machine. Instead the emotional intelligence takes the form of experience > understanding > expression. The principal difference between input and experience and that between processing and understanding and also between expression and output is that, when we experience, understand or express, we basically attach some meaning to the actions, while input, process are output are mere actions and carry no meaning by themselves.
Experiencing involves deriving true meaning out of the sensory inputs. Understanding involves fine tuning this ‘meaning’ by the past experiences and expression involves a complex process of conveying this meaning to outside.
Thus, ideally Mr. Smile should derive the meaning “I am listening to a person” when he gets the raw sensory input, then only it will qualify for ‘experience’. Then he should fine tune this meaning to “I am listening to stranger” as the voice does not matches to any previous records, then further it should fine tune it to “I am listening to a stranger, Whenever I hear strangers, I register them into my directory, this increases my contact list and hence I survive more and thus I am happy right now” this is when Mr. Smile would really understand the situation, and then only he will express himself by smiling.
The problem with LIDA is that if tomorrow, Mr. Smile’s jaw mechanism breaks down he will cease to be Mr. Smile thereafter as the stranger’s voice won’t bring smile on his face. Is that same with an emotionally intelligent human being? Of course not! Mr. Smile’s positions is just like any other paralytic who is unable to move his limbs, however unlike Mr. Smile’s total break down, the alive Mr. Smile will desperately search to find means of expressing his happiness and may eventually agree with the interpreter that ‘blinking of an eye will mean he is happy, and then he will smile from his eyelids and not from his lips.
This will happen because he is attached to the emotion of expressing himself which is constantly active in his mind, always on the lookout of forming a composite with the idea of blinking the eye. Implementing experience, understanding and expression in place of dumb input, process and output is the key for creating emotionally intelligent machine.
I agree that the idea of implementing will be very complex one. But as we all are already feeling attached with this emotion, there is no doubt that one day ideas will crystallize and establish a complete understanding of the mind and this understanding will express itself by a really ‘creative’ emotionally intelligent computer.
