(Excerpted transcript) Kenneth Stanley on MLST – AI: Is it science or art?

Kenneth Stanley (KS): … there’s this duality…. in the way i think about science and engineering. … the two sides of a coin where scientists use engineering to control in order to gain new knowledge. Whereas engineers take the knowledge that we have and use it to gain control by building a better whatever

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KS: I think there’s an analogy between art and AI. It’s more than just process. It’s like it is a branch of art, about reproducing natural phenomena in artifice… The reason i started thinking about this was because I was getting in some arguments with people where they tried to say that what I was saying was not scientific. “This is not a scientific question, it can’t be objectively analyzed. You can’t get an objective, you can’t get falsification on this question, so it’s pointless”.
And i felt like that is just pure cowardice. Are you just saying you are afraid to inquire in directions where you don’t know how to falsify? To me that’s just cowardice, and I do not like associating science with cowardice.
I started thinking about “am i really doing science, like maybe there’s another view here?“. I don’t know that i was like fully just trying to to generate hypotheses and validate or falsify them. There’s an artistic side to creating these algorithms.

Host: i think your frame of reference doesn’t seem to fit into the paradigm of science in so many ways

KS: I don’t want to be associated with kooky views that “we should get rid of science” or something like that. I just think it’s expands our horizons to understand what we’re doing and how it relates to art. An artistic inclination can help you as a scientist. This is not new to point these things out, but I’m trying to make a much more literal point: that AI itself, specifically AI with the word Artificial in front of it, is really about art in a strong way. … (to be creating) these new creations, new ways of thinking about things, these were really inspired from a more artistic sense.

And he was making the same point that to kind of say like, “well no if it doesn’t have a certain level of rigor”. Well, in order to get to those those forms of rigor, you first have to have that stepping stone, that inspiration that generates something brand new.

And it is sad that people try to dismiss it as “Well that’s not science or that’s not mathematics“. it’s an interesting response there. “Good it’s not science, (so) like, i wonder where that leads exactly?” I’m not pretending to be talking about science. It’s still something we should discuss. Good it’s not already known.

… When art resonated, it’s not about correctness or accuracy. People felt like artistic realisation, not scientific realisation, where it resonated with some sense of intelligence and inspiration.