Algorithm A New Way of Seeing the World
Ambience: Rainforest Dawn (Dung Beetles)
Could computers help us see the world in a new way? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Jantzen: We are very limited as human beings by the way in which we have traditionally categorized things.
Benjamin Jantzen is an assistant professor of philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts and sciences at Virginia Tech.
Jantzen: The concepts you use to describe the world, or the concepts you use to group things into same or different – that fixes the set of possible laws you can discover. You cannot see order amongst concepts that you’ve never formulated in the first place. You can only, as it were, see relations amongst the things that you’re conditioned to see.
The machine can look at a collection of phenomena and see it in a way that we haven’t seen it before. If you can do this, you can find new ways to say, control, properties of materials. You can find completely new ways to approach drug design, because the machine is focusing on quantities, on features of living things that we didn’t think to look at, because we sort of have our own established vocabulary.
If the machine can pick its own way of grouping things together, it can help us with predicting and controlling biodiversity. So ecosystems, for example, are extremely complex phenomena. We have historical ways of talking about them, but it’s not clear that our ways give us the best sorts of laws for predicting or controlling the kind of things we actually want to predict and control.
For example, a computer might recognize interdependent relationships within an ecosystem that scientists have missed. That could be a huge help in better understanding and managing habitats. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.