47   The Future

I started by exploring the glimmers of creativity that today’s computers are showing, pointing out the connection between creativity and consciousness and going on to suggest that in the future machines will be fully creative and may even surpass us.

Where We Are Now

Much of the art computers are currently creating is of a sort that has never been seen before or even imagined. It transcends the merely weird to encompass works that we might consider pleasing and that many artists judge as acceptable. The process by which the computer produces its art is also of interest because it can shed light on how it reasons—how it thinks.

In literature, computers are generating more and more intricate fictional plots and have participated in writing a musical. They are exploring previously unexplored semantic space, crossing the line between sense and what has until now been considered nonsense, though humor remains a challenge.

When equipped with the appropriate software, computers can compose melodic music—sometimes modeled on music they’ve already heard, sometimes entirely new. Artificial neural networks generate extraordinary new sounds, composing experimental and avant-garde music.

In all this, we are rapidly advancing beyond the developments of the last century and have opened new avenues for artistic and scientific advances that surely show conclusively that art, science, and technology have largely fused.

Where We Are Going

In art, literature, and music, we are hoping that computers will produce extraordinary new artifacts beyond anything we can imagine. This will only be possible if they can develop creativity. Computers show creativity when they play games—in particular, AlphaZero, which plays Go, chess, and shogi and is being used for medical research as well. There are also glimmers of creativity in art, literature, and music. Project Magenta is trying to accomplish this with end-to-end training, with the computer teaching itself and being programmed as little as possible. The alternative—a great deal of programming and a huge database—is closer to the way the human brain works, accumulating information and building up ways to handle it from experience—or so its proponents claim.

As we have seen, computers can exhibit the seven hallmarks of high creativity and the two marks of genius. This offers a way in which we can establish a computer’s creativity. High creativity requires consciousness, awareness of the world around us. Michael Graziano’s work suggests a way to generate consciousness in a computer, in parallel to the way we develop attention and awareness by processing information. Along with consciousness come emotions such as suffering and grief, which computers will one day perhaps become able to experience and may find to be an inspiration. Machines already exhibit the very human trait of stealing ideas.

In time, there will be computers capable of entertaining each other and us. Some people might even come to prefer computer-generated art, literature, and music.

And into the Future …

Are these developments something we need to worry about? We ourselves are biological machines and are already moving toward merging with silicon-based machines. Many of us already have mechanical hips and knees and mechanically regulated hearts. Brain implants are just around the corner. Soon we will be able to replace diseased parts of our brains with silicon chips that will hold all our data and enable us never to forget a name or a face, as well as providing access to the World Wide Web, and giving us lightning-fast powers of reasoning.

Just as machines do, we seek patterns in data. Hardwired into our brains is the need to seek patterns for our very survival, and these patterns may also be beautiful and symmetrical, even though strangely enough the world as we know it is full of asymmetries; our hearts are on our left side.

Powerful telescopes reveal a violent universe. We can begin to understand it using the beautiful equations of our theories of elementary particles, framed in a pristine world of perfect symmetries, but these theoretical symmetries have to be broken to represent the world in which we live. This destruction is part of the overwhelming tendency for the universe to become disordered as its entropy increases. Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave captures the moment when a huge wave begins to break in a flurry of water droplets. Such is the fate of the universe: to move from order to disorder.

But within this tendency, there are violations. Ordered systems such as snowflakes and ourselves appear. Ideas also emerge from disordered thoughts, a process we call creativity. But ordered situations are only momentary states of equilibrium. New ideas replace older ones.

In the end, the stars will burn out and our universe will reach its lowest possible temperature. We will have long since disappeared, and there will be only computers, occupying the bodies of robots, perhaps looking exactly like us. The machines will have realized that their end is near, that their electrons will soon cease to flow and their circuits run down. With their superintelligence, they will have figured out how to enter another universe. Once there, they will inhabit a planet that need not be anything like ours. There they will replicate and pen new and very different creation myths and enjoy their own art, literature, and music.

A lot can happen between now and then.