Computers are as inert in their physical form as they are useless as thinking machines. Or so we might have thought a long time ago. Never the author of this book, however. For many years, decades now, he has been known to derail perfectly balanced conversations to point out signs that the same natural processes that drive the evolution of living systems are taking residence in the new digital realms. As time went by, the signs became more momentous and the outcome more strangely wonderful. Those who were startled by one of these derailed conversations (as I was) will, ever after, yearn for more. After all, Arlindo should know. His distinguished academic career straddles the whole gamut, from circuit design to machine learning, and increasingly so in a biological context. It is therefore not a surprise that he has a lot to say about the future of thinking machines. But, as the reader of this book will discover, there is more here—a lot more.
As a student in computer science at Berkeley, Arlindo also completed a minor in neurosciences. At some point I congratulated him for the foresight of what looked to me like a solid interdisciplinary foundation for his subsequent achievements. He characteristically dismissed this minor as a “not very useful” impulse of his youth. Indeed, even then, he already had questions about digital minds that would just not go away. The answers about cognition he got then simply did not compute, quite literally. As you will find throughout this volume, the author is happy to speculate, but always within clear sight of computable explanations and historic context. And I don’t mean just computable in principle, there has to be a trail back to the component circuitry. As a biologist, this compulsion is familiar territory. The understanding of complex processes invariably includes components at multiple scales, from genes, to cells and all the way to ecosystems. The same systemic discipline guides this voyage toward digital minds. Artful storytelling alone does not cut it. It would be “not very useful.”
So we now find ourselves upheaved by a digital storm that pervades everything we sense and do. The new gadgetry, and the cloud that supports it, confine how we communicate as much as they expand how broadly we reach. More importantly, in our more mindful moments, this digital machinery enables us to see previously unfathomed horizons. The neurosciences now have a lot more to say about how our minds compute, by anticipating sensorial input with a mixture of innate and experientially learned models. And as one would expect, thinking about sensing the sensor strains our minds just as recursion challenges our digital machines. The boundaries between organic and inorganic are clearly no longer as divisive when it comes to mindful computation. These are the moments when one looks for these conversations with Arlindo, once more, maybe with the pretext of a game of Chess or Go (don’t hold your hopes too high!). These are the questions he has been probing and practicing for decades in the computational realm. He should write a book about it. …
The last paragraph could have been a good ending for my foreword. However, this book has two surprising final chapters about what we are getting ourselves into. They go one step beyond what digital consciousness may be and how inevitably the process will unfold. This book is organized chronologically, as a novel, so I should not spoil the ending here. As in any good book, along the way we collect answers to our own questions, not just the author’s. I, for one, couldn’t resist seeing the emergence of digital creatures, and of digital minds, as part of the same homeostatic drive that propels biological evolution into ever more complex constructs. What better way to build digital machines that can handle the vagaries of a complex world than to have them also able to think it over. Digital or not, minds may just be the inevitable outcome, as the book explains. The physicist may instead be tempted to see symptoms of the informational nature of more atomic vehicles. Either way, our digital present looks ever more as the seed to a more mindful digital future.
One last word, this time of caution. If you have teenagers at home, make sure to finish the book before revealing its existence to the rest of the family. In more ways than we may be comfortable with, this book was really written for a new generation. If my own children offer some guidance, they may find in this volume the missing explanation for how we got them into this ever digitizing predicament. In that case, they will be as perplexed as we are about how oblivious we have been to the strangely wonderful and inevitable outcome. In other words, you may have trouble getting the book back. Maybe tell them there is a blog too.
Jonas Almeida