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from PART I - A LONG-PONDERED OUTFIT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2017
Instead of fruitless attempts to divide the world into things with and things without the essence of mind, or consciousness, we should examine the many detailed similarities and differences between systems.
– Aaron Sloman, The Structure of the Space of Possible Minds (1984)A PHENOMENAL DISPLAY is taking shape before our eyes. A variety of new behaviours present themselves embodied as computers, robots, enhanced humans, hybrids and collectives with sundry types of integration and communication. Can all possible behaviours, extant or extinct, actual or conceivable, natural or artificial, be embraced by the machine kingdom, the set of all computable interactive systems? What is the essence of each of these systems, how do they usually react and what are they able to do? The understanding and measurement of these behavioural features is not only a fascinating scientific challenge but an earnest need for society. It is needed for devising policies in all areas of life, from labour to leisure, and for the assessment of the effective progress and safety of the engineering disciplines behind this surge. What theory and tools do we have for this scrutiny? We only have some scattered pieces of the puzzle, and some of them do not match. It is time to integrate, sort and systematise these bits in the widest perspective. For this purpose, we must set a common conceptual ground upon which we can formulate old and new questions properly.
FACE THE DIVERSITY
Many biologists view our current time as a period of massive extinction. With the exception of some global catastrophes, this century will wash away more species than any other in history: millions, if not billions, of species.
The rate of this Anthropocene extinction is around 100 times the natural rate. Not yet tantamount in magnitude and diversity, but accelerating at a far greater rate, there is an opposite explosion of new creatures.
This massive explosion is about a different kind of breed. We call them computers, and they are all around us. They are constantly equipped with new types of communication and organisation, new bodies and interfaces and apparently whimsical ways of hybridisation. We have seen the rise of dustbots, digital pets, video game bots, robot swarms, online assistants, roboroaches, machine-animal herds, chatbots, machine translators, animats, algorithmic artists, crowdsourcing platforms and driverless cars.
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