Consciousness is one of these terms that comes up again and again when talking about the newest iterations of current AI systems. But what is consciousness? Honestly, the term was already hard to define even before the advent of AI. I guess the most common explanation these days is still that consciousness starts building up the more a system, a biological system, becomes more complex. Most people would argue that under these circumstances, only we as humans are able to be aware of who we are and reflect on what we are doing. So humans are to be considered conscious. But what about animals? Or plants? Or any living cell? And finally, what about AI? read more…
blog: science
What would civilization be without play? Would it even exist? Indeed one could argue that play is older than civilization, that it's even older than culture itself. Long before we became settlers and started developing rites and cultures to built up our societies play was already there. Children are playing without ever being taught how to play. Even animals are playing. But why? Why is there a play instinct rooted so deeply inside of our human biology? read more…
Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy.
—James Gleick
Everything tends toward entropy. Entropy means disorder and chaos. Entropy means the final state of everything. Sooner or later everything will be in the state of entropy. That state will be totally random and unable to produce any meaningful work anymore. The energy left in the system is completely dissipated. In short it's pretty close to our understanding of chaos. In general entropy is a concept used in many varying fields, such as physics, information theory, and thermodynamics. It always refers to a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. read more…
In today's world information is ubiquitous. It's everywhere, you can't escape. All these libraries, books, social media accounts, YouTube videos, PDFs and Websites need to be processed at some point. The relevant information needs to be taken out, all the irrelevancies need to be left behind. But it becomes increasingly difficult to do something meaningful with all that information. Filtering and sorting seem to become key.
If we start looking at the history of information it's not so much the process of storing and organizing all this data that seems to be a burdon, it's the act of forgetting that consumes most of our energy. Forgetting is work, forgetting means effort. You could even go as far as to say that forgetting is as important as remembering to process data successfully. read more…