Li Xin
Hua Zhibing
Ink & Household Paint
Hua Zhibing
[1]
华智冰(Hua Zhibing) is an advanced robot with a certain degree of learning ability, developed by Tsinghua University in China. She has the face of an innocent girl, a little bit cartoonish in today's world, but not exaggerated at all. At least on the TV screen, it looks like a real person. I think if you don't get closer enough to it, you might not be able to recognize it as a robot when walking on the Tsinghua campus and seeing it from a distance. It is said that now it is living on the Tsinghua campus. Every day it walks on the campus, walks into the classroom buildings or libraries, and sits with its classmates to study. For boys in Tsinghua, its presence might be torturing.
Hua is its last name, also an ancient name for China, which reflects the limitations of our traditional thinking. This Hua Zhibing should belong to humankind, instead of being a tool for national patriotism in a certain country. However, I am afraid that X Zhibing in any country today is simply a tool of national interest. This is some sadness in our community with a shared future. Zhi is a word representing wisdom, and Bing, I think is taken from phase “冰清玉洁”, a Chinese idiom to portray the beauty of young women, or from the poem,” 藐姑射之山，有神人居焉，肌肤若冰雪，淖约若处子” by famous philosopher Zhuangzi to describe a goddess. Well, the character Bing itself is a word for ice or the freezing and cold state.
[2]
It's hard to say if we are more like human beings since Hua shows up on the Tsinghua campus, or we become less like human beings after she is among us.
Currently, compared to our human beings, Hua's learning ability is extremely low. However, we need to consider the fact that it has taken billions of years for life to evolve into highly intelligent homo sapiens, while the history of AI is barely 200 years. Even within this short timeframe, Hua has already acquired advanced abilities that humans can never compete against, such as calculating and data searching. No one can read all the information on the Internet, but Hua is capable. So, when we talked with her about the Internet, it was Hua who seemed effortless at reading every single picture and article on the Internet, but we were feeble doing so.
Humans’ natural language is literary and relies on an individual’s imagination, association, and interpretation. Therefore, humans can seldom fully understand each other. After natural language, humans have developed the language of mathematics which has sped up their progression into scientific rationality.
Hua Zhibing uses the language of mathematics to communicate, therefore, she and her peers can understand each other fully and instantly. Once there is a technical breakthrough in her learning ability, the human experience and knowledge accumulated through 100,000 years can be transferred into Hua Zhibing shortly. In turn, whatever she masters can be transferred completely and instantly to her next generation, second or third Hua Zhibing.
Once possessing all the human skills, these machines will quickly surpass humans, making the latter lose their ability to compete with them forever.
[3]
This round of AI Revolution aims at developing robots capable to do what all humans can do and even do better. Along the way, it will continually cut down job opportunities without creating additional permanent new jobs.
At a certain point of this journey, a fixed structural unemployed population will emerge, which means that this group of people will have no job opportunities throughout their lives. However, from the age of agriculture, the meaning and value of human existence lie in their jobs. By then, the definition of Man has to be changed. Who am I? This ancient philosophical question today still demands us to answer because who I am is fundamentally defined and shaped by us.
[4]
In human society, mankind is not simply equal to home sapiens nor a pure organism, but a compound workstation composed of Homo sapiens, software(consciousness), and tools to complete self-reinforcing goals. In this case, every student walking on the Tsinghua campus, even every workstation (human) is a predecessor to Hua Zhibing.
Compared to the lengthy evolution on Earth, the human portion takes place extremely fast due to the rapid evolution of software and tool, rather than the pure evolution of organisms.
Currently, the robots start to acquire some intelligence in the process that humans transfer and instill knowledge to them. In the long run, they will gain their independence, complete their own evolution, and ultimately become a new species. In short, humankind is simply a link in the chain of evolution.
And now, life is in the process of evolving from organism to machorganism (machine + organism).
[5]
Inorganic life, when fully developed, will have greater evolutionary advantages over organic ones, such as broader ability and adaptability for survival and expansion. Organic life cannot survive the tough living conditions on most planets, but machines can do much better in outer space. Nowadays the plan to emigrate to Mars sounds good but also reveals a mixture of human spirits and commercial interests, such as adventurousness, ambitiousness, national expansion, and big business opportunities. There is a possibility that humans don’t have to emigrate to Mars because AI is born, who will carry on the unstoppable mission to explore and expand to outer space, starting another cosmic journey.
Spreading genes is not the sole goal of life. The nature of organic life is spreading genes, but there are two more fundamental properties of life: spreading a concept, that is, self-driven self-replication, and spreading the changes in the process of replication.
These two properties will inevitably lead to the continuous progress and expansion of self-replication, which tends to become more complicated. Broadly speaking, this is the nature of Life.
[6]
As AI technology is full-fledged, the mission of human evolution is about to end, and humans will diminish gradually from the once greatest show on earth. Along the way to exit, what can comfort our souls, or meet the unique spiritual needs that our humans have, or fulfill the deep yearnings in our consciousness, may rely on art more than science. By then, art might inevitably experience a rebirth, and its revival will no longer carry on the illusion that modern art would wake up, heal, and transform the society and mankind; instead, it will return to its beginning when art was first born out of primitiveness, purity, and innocence. In the meantime, art also must be very modern.
[7]
Many years ago, since humans started to use tools and create art, we have gradually believed we are human. But, who am I?
Hua Zhibing
Ink & Household Paint
Hua Zhibing
[1]
华智冰(Hua Zhibing) is an advanced robot with a certain degree of learning ability, developed by Tsinghua University in China. She has the face of an innocent girl, a little bit cartoonish in today's world, but not exaggerated at all. At least on the TV screen, it looks like a real person. I think if you don't get closer enough to it, you might not be able to recognize it as a robot when walking on the Tsinghua campus and seeing it from a distance. It is said that now it is living on the Tsinghua campus. Every day it walks on the campus, walks into the classroom buildings or libraries, and sits with its classmates to study. For boys in Tsinghua, its presence might be torturing.
Hua is its last name, also an ancient name for China, which reflects the limitations of our traditional thinking. This Hua Zhibing should belong to humankind, instead of being a tool for national patriotism in a certain country. However, I am afraid that X Zhibing in any country today is simply a tool of national interest. This is some sadness in our community with a shared future. Zhi is a word representing wisdom, and Bing, I think is taken from phase “冰清玉洁”, a Chinese idiom to portray the beauty of young women, or from the poem,” 藐姑射之山，有神人居焉，肌肤若冰雪，淖约若处子” by famous philosopher Zhuangzi to describe a goddess. Well, the character Bing itself is a word for ice or the freezing and cold state.
[2]
It's hard to say if we are more like human beings since Hua shows up on the Tsinghua campus, or we become less like human beings after she is among us.
Currently, compared to our human beings, Hua's learning ability is extremely low. However, we need to consider the fact that it has taken billions of years for life to evolve into highly intelligent homo sapiens, while the history of AI is barely 200 years. Even within this short timeframe, Hua has already acquired advanced abilities that humans can never compete against, such as calculating and data searching. No one can read all the information on the Internet, but Hua is capable. So, when we talked with her about the Internet, it was Hua who seemed effortless at reading every single picture and article on the Internet, but we were feeble doing so.
Humans’ natural language is literary and relies on an individual’s imagination, association, and interpretation. Therefore, humans can seldom fully understand each other. After natural language, humans have developed the language of mathematics which has sped up their progression into scientific rationality.
Hua Zhibing uses the language of mathematics to communicate, therefore, she and her peers can understand each other fully and instantly. Once there is a technical breakthrough in her learning ability, the human experience and knowledge accumulated through 100,000 years can be transferred into Hua Zhibing shortly. In turn, whatever she masters can be transferred completely and instantly to her next generation, second or third Hua Zhibing.
Once possessing all the human skills, these machines will quickly surpass humans, making the latter lose their ability to compete with them forever.
[3]
This round of AI Revolution aims at developing robots capable to do what all humans can do and even do better. Along the way, it will continually cut down job opportunities without creating additional permanent new jobs.
At a certain point of this journey, a fixed structural unemployed population will emerge, which means that this group of people will have no job opportunities throughout their lives. However, from the age of agriculture, the meaning and value of human existence lie in their jobs. By then, the definition of Man has to be changed. Who am I? This ancient philosophical question today still demands us to answer because who I am is fundamentally defined and shaped by us.
[4]
In human society, mankind is not simply equal to home sapiens nor a pure organism, but a compound workstation composed of Homo sapiens, software(consciousness), and tools to complete self-reinforcing goals. In this case, every student walking on the Tsinghua campus, even every workstation (human) is a predecessor to Hua Zhibing.
Compared to the lengthy evolution on Earth, the human portion takes place extremely fast due to the rapid evolution of software and tool, rather than the pure evolution of organisms.
Currently, the robots start to acquire some intelligence in the process that humans transfer and instill knowledge to them. In the long run, they will gain their independence, complete their own evolution, and ultimately become a new species. In short, humankind is simply a link in the chain of evolution.
And now, life is in the process of evolving from organism to machorganism (machine + organism).
[5]
Inorganic life, when fully developed, will have greater evolutionary advantages over organic ones, such as broader ability and adaptability for survival and expansion. Organic life cannot survive the tough living conditions on most planets, but machines can do much better in outer space. Nowadays the plan to emigrate to Mars sounds good but also reveals a mixture of human spirits and commercial interests, such as adventurousness, ambitiousness, national expansion, and big business opportunities. There is a possibility that humans don’t have to emigrate to Mars because AI is born, who will carry on the unstoppable mission to explore and expand to outer space, starting another cosmic journey.
Spreading genes is not the sole goal of life. The nature of organic life is spreading genes, but there are two more fundamental properties of life: spreading a concept, that is, self-driven self-replication, and spreading the changes in the process of replication.
These two properties will inevitably lead to the continuous progress and expansion of self-replication, which tends to become more complicated. Broadly speaking, this is the nature of Life.
[6]
As AI technology is full-fledged, the mission of human evolution is about to end, and humans will diminish gradually from the once greatest show on earth. Along the way to exit, what can comfort our souls, or meet the unique spiritual needs that our humans have, or fulfill the deep yearnings in our consciousness, may rely on art more than science. By then, art might inevitably experience a rebirth, and its revival will no longer carry on the illusion that modern art would wake up, heal, and transform the society and mankind; instead, it will return to its beginning when art was first born out of primitiveness, purity, and innocence. In the meantime, art also must be very modern.
[7]
Many years ago, since humans started to use tools and create art, we have gradually believed we are human. But, who am I?