Michael Levin

There's no miracle going on here, right?

The hardware isn't doing some crazy thing that it wasn't supposed to do.

The point is that despite following the algorithm to do one thing,

It is also at the same time doing other things that are neither prescribed nor forbidden by the algorithm.

It's the space between the chance and necessity, which is how a lot of people see these things.

It's that free space.

We don't really have a good vocabulary for it where the interesting things happen.

And to whatever extent it's doing other things that are useful, that stuff is computationally without extra cost.

Now, there's one other cool thing about this.

And this is the beginning of a lot of thinking that I've done about when this relates to AI and stuff like that, intrinsic motivations.

The sorting of the digits is what we forced it to do.

The clustering is an intrinsic motivation.

We didn't ask for it.

We didn't expect it to happen.

We didn't explicitly forbid it, but we didn't know.

This is a great definition of the intrinsic motivation of a system.

So when people say, oh, that's a machine.

It only does what you programmed it to do.

I, as a human, have intrinsic motivation.

I'm creative and I have intrinsic motivation.