School of Life?

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So - Google Deepmind wins gold at the 'coding Olympics'. Interesting, and frankly not a great surprise as coding is something that AI is becoming increasingly proficient at. Does this mean that AI is approaching actual artificial general intelligence [the ultimate goal of its proponents]? Of course not. Can it achieve things that humans simply can't? Yes. But by the same token, there are some tasks, even in the field of coding, that humans are simply better at; and these are the areas where human intuition, rather than simply raw knowledge or expertise trumps either in taking an idea further and beyond the rules and formalities of what would otherwise appear to be an entirely codified [sorry] discipline. Truth is that humans invented computers and computer coding in the first place; wrote the rule books and then proceeded to tear up those rules in the service of human invention, despite themselves.

I once heard an 'expert' coder telling a young games programmer that he [naturally a 'he'] wouldn't countenance certain practices in any code written under his watch [far too abstruse stuff for me to understand, let alone relate here]; only to be rebutted by the youth, saying that he could never achieve the kind of performance demanded of his code if he followed the strictures of the older 'more experienced' man, and offering perfectly credible alternative solutions to the orthodoxy being touted. The fact is that no matter how much of the orthodoxy of man-made rules we try and follow, there are always spaces twixt those rules where the magic happens and stuff just works better.

Where humans and AI differ on the most fundamental level is our [human] constant subversion of and re-invention of the rules we ourselves create. This is not to say that AI itself is invalid or inherently 'evil' - we created it after all - but rather that it lacks the intuitive spark that lurks within the human psyche to just say 'fuck it' and head off on a tangent to see where we might just end up. My personal life [including the odd high-level commercial coding incursion] has been governed by such tangential decision forks, and some of my best ideas have emerged from that apparently chaotic thinking. But they are all in the past. And so, hey, ho: on to the next thing, and the next, and the next. Don't let the moss grow, except where it is useful and beautiful to behold... 

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