The first tremblings of terror come from a computer program that can write a legal brief, and then argue in real time against a trained human lawyer. But that's obvious. Diagnosing cancer by looking at an x-ray? Pssh. Saw that coming.
The way technology co-evolves with our species is by getting in the middle of the more creative processes, because that's insidious, which means we don't notice, and so we can't stop it.
The advance of creative pursuit is circuitous, it's unmeasurable, and subject to unannounced yet dramatic shifts in paradigmatic underpinnings. In fact, nobody is even arguing that it's a kind of progress. Your benchmarks, your metrics - they have no power here. A state board of medical examiners will tell you how good this year's crop of doctors perform on their exams etc. There is no national artist database counting the overall social effects of Banksy's automated self-destructive artwork, or Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama. Because that's not how that works.
When you let the robot into the house - the temple that is your body and the mind that controls it - it does things there. And because this isn't a real place, it's hard for us to keep track of what's happening.
These things start small, and they don't seem like a big deal, because who cares if a robot is making art, or even suggestions for making art. I mean it's not like it's making executive orders from the Presidential Office, right? And the willingness to use an automated industrial process to reproduce imagery, let's say via Japanese woodcuts or Andy Warhol's prints, vs "requiring" that a human, perhaps a shaman, maybe just an "artist", to make each image from their own hands, what did that do to us as a species? Did that change us more than allowing in-vitro fertilization for reproduction? Or birth control pills? I doubt it. Then again, maybe they're related (for example by changing the way we value and rely on "real" humans among us).
We can't answer these questions very well, but we can probably agree that this is where shit gets weird:
Graph-based AI model finds hidden links between science and art to suggest novel materials
Nov 2024, phys.org
They analyze a collection of 1,000 scientific papers about biological materials and turn them into a knowledge map in the form of a graph, using "category theory". The graph revealed how different pieces of information are connected and was able to find groups of related ideas and key points that link many concepts together.
Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.
The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and "Symphony No. 9," suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity.
In another experiment, the graph-based AI model recommended creating a new biological material inspired by the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky's painting, "Composition VII." The AI suggested a new mycelium-based composite material. "The result of this material combines an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos and order, adjustable property, porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionality."
Above image: Mycelium-based biological material inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII - Markus Buehler at MIT - 2025 [link]
via MIT: Markus J Buehler, Accelerating scientific discovery with generative knowledge extraction, graph-based representation, and multimodal intelligent graph reasoning, Machine Learning: Science and Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228
Thumbnail image credit: Graffiti from Berlin Wall stone section - Chew Yen Fook Nikon Small World - 2024
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