Imagine an infinite library of new fields of study
Every problem scope has different key features derived from within its own system. For buildings, tensile strength. For pipes, fluid flow. For circuits, voltage and current. For interplanetary travel, lightspeed travel and cryonics. Without the fields that house these features, they would be nameless—we do not care for features that do not belong to a system of interest.
Systems of interest give names to nameless features—they turn sound waves into music, binary into data formats, or prime numbers into cryptography. Intent births fields, fields define systems, and systems house features. Interest, like the big bang, expands our universe.
Imagine if we charge an AI to create new fields of interest. AI seems well suited to this—imagine giving an AI the task of building a building in an open world physics engine. Would it not derive the importance of features such as tensile strength?
AI seems uniquely suited for declaring an interest and optimizing for that interest, and in the process, creating a completely new field of study.
A couple of ideas based on the above thoughts:
1) There should be a way to clearly and simply define interest for an AI. Dall-E is already playing around with this in infancy through the english language, but I wonder if the interface to ask AIs to do things is itself a place that AI can improve. Imagine Dall-E but learning was applied to its input system as well, not just art.
2) An AI that "discovers" new fields. Take prime numbers and the fact that multplying two primes is easy, but deriving what two primes was multiplied is hard. Without the need for security, this attribute would be useless, but because of the need, this created an entire field of cryptography. I wonder if an AI could help discover new fields based on interest.
3) A sci-fi story. Imagine a species similar to ours that achieved global sustainability, effectively captured all the available energy of its solar system and used thousands of years of computing time for AI to discover new interests and creating systems around them. It would be an infinite library of wild, crazy new fields of study.
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