When Marvin Minsky was working on artificial intelligence in the 1960's he discovered that when dealing with the press to describe some of his projects that the one story that the press always reported to the world was that he was working on a robot that plays ping pong. He was not in fact working on a robot that did this. He created the term eigenstory to describe this sort of scenario. The eigenstory is named after the types of results that often return from differential equations that are more a function of the system than the input. So the eigenstory is the one stable output from the media that people want to hear as the real story whether it is actually true or not. The important lesson from this from a marketing perspective is that you can feed the press your own version of what you are trying to make but they may only register an eigenstory result. Rather than fighting this result it might make sense to just learn from the output of what people are able to hear and repeat and try to create a product that does exactly what the story output of the system suggests. I have become less impressed with the individual genius of inventors given the basic view that products themselves do evolve out of the system. They are the eigenstories of societies that have become concrete.

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence recently given the recent slow roll backwards in the pro-choice/pro-life debates driven by actions like the South Dakota abortion ban. I am a believer that we will be superceded by the evolution of intelligent machines more equipped to explore the universe. Once the computers do become self-aware among the first problems that we will face is the restructuring of politics. Politics is how people are organized and governed but these intelligent beings won't be people or have the same interests and needs as people. To have a separation between humans and machines with two political systems will also pose the problems that laws that govern the interaction between them need to be consistent. But it's unlikely that there will be room for AI voting in the US legislature. The AIs would be unlikely to be trusted in the executive branch given their track record in movies like The Terminator.

The issue of AI reproductive rights would be a key problem. Any organized group of living and self-aware intelligent things is going to worry about how the group adds new members. The conventional religious answer is to become as plentiful as grains of sand. Since our silicon buddies are most likely made indirectly from processed sand that might not be a problem. But if an AI is developing and it probably will take about 10-14 months for one to develop rather than just machine them off a production line. Part of the AI development process will be the slow act of becoming self-aware with a unique personality learned through a neural process following a sexual intermixing of code from AI parents rather than a fabrication of a machine from parts in a factory. Will operating systems come into play and is Microsoft going to try to control life through a control economy while freedom is available through an open source market economy? What will the machines decide in their own right to life debate if they are allowed to self govern? When will a new machine be considered to be alive during it's development process? Will we decide for them when a new AI life can be terminated? Will the AIs have problems with gender inequalities, incest, rape, and abortions? Will they just follow the human lead or supercede our primitive understanding of life as is written in the bible or in scientific texts? All of these questions will be told in headline eigenstories in the future.

Personally I would like to play ping pong against a robot and it could be as far as we get in my lifetime.