Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1997
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Guess before you leap
As a student I had the benefit of some outstanding teachers. Many were seasoned engineers and physicists from industry who taught me much more than principles and theory: they imparted intuition and insight. Among the many guiding principles I gained from this seminal period were these vital words. "In mathematics and science it is acceptable to have no answer. However, in engineering this is never admissible. You must always get an answer, even if it is the wrong one. Engineers have to start somewhere, and no answer means you cannot even start. If you can get started you will rapidly iterate toward an acceptable solution. So always get an answer."

Another of my teachers was a physicist turned mathematician who laboured with me as I struggled with the concepts of partial differential equations and variational calculus. Over one difficult and protracted problem, he suddenly looked me in the eye and said: "When tackling any problem it is always worth stopping to think what the answer might be."

In both cases these were timely and prophetic words. We are now squaring up to a highly complex and non-linear world, and face a future largely dominated by problems we cannot solve by any linear or well-behaved, or even known means. So it is essential that we develop new insight through direct experience. Finding solutions for the future means starting somewhere. So what might we guess for the most important and necessary conditions for life and intelligence?

Currently there are no satisfactory definitions for life or artificial life, intelligence or artificial intelligence. Indeed, it may prove impossible to produce complete and all-embracing definitions. This is not only because we do not understand these domains with sufficient precision, but perhaps more significantly, because evolution never stops, and our understanding may never catch up or keep pace. Further, we also have a limited view of what life and intelligence are - we tend to be restricted to a carbon-based view. So here are two partial listings of what may be the essential defining properties.

For life: a birth - death/creation - destruction process; mutation; evolution; chaos; competition; communication; collaboration; co-operation; energy conservation; entropy growth; a changing environment.

For intelligence: memory; decision-making; information subsumption; communication; cognition; contemplation - waiting to react; uncertainty; a degree of autonomy, predictability and unpredictability; more input than output data.

We have only recently discovered that self-organisation and chaos are vital ingredients for carbon-based life, with all known living things existing on the edge of strange attractors. The same may turn out to be true of data and information - perhaps data becomes information on the edge. Life and intelligence seem to demand (or create) a risky, non-linear and uncertain world.

Today we have a responsibility for the stewardship of a planet. Curiously, we are not mere caretakers, but a part of the ecosystem itself. Soon, we may find ourselves responsible for a new dimension to this system as we extend into a world of silicon - my guess.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk

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