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Balanarayana SureshBuilding machines that could embody life itself
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What I cannot create, I do not understand. - Richard Feynman
I am a maker, and my biggest dream as a maker is to create life, perhaps in a machine, and to know all its building blocks and moving parts. I want this artificial life to interact with the world, develop independently, grow, learn and continue to 'live' much beyond my own existence.
As a maker I generally play with ideas of how things work and how to make them work. Currently I'm trying to piece together the building blocks of life, even theoretically, drawing ideas and mechanisms from information theory, statistical physics, non equilibrium thermodynamics, control theory, dynamical systems, evolutionary algorithms, renormalization, scaling laws...
I have worked on many curiosity-driven projects. But I haven't found any of them as challenging as this quest to create life. Who doesn't like a challenge. Developing a fundamental understanding of life is central to my work, and will drive all my creations.
More broadly, the understanding of life is quite an important milestone in progress of any advanced civilisation. It is the moment that it can look itself in a mirror and understand what it is - perhaps even the birth of sentience as a civilisation. It gives the power of foresight to our actions and even perhaps the meaning of life. Life is central to the areas of learning, intelligence, autonomy, language, economy, social structure, sustainability, etc
Its importance is similar to that of the birth of physics, which described how the physical world worked and how to remake it. It led to engineering that built the modern world. So if we stretch out a similar path for understanding of 'life', we haven't yet reached the stage equivalent to Newton's laws and calculus. What follows this phase will probably be the most exciting phase in all of human history.
This drives my search to understand life. To understand what makes life behave magically compared to the rest of the physical world. While we all know that the environment shapes the organism, it is curious how they all behave intentionally at every scale. Currently I am trying to understand this "intentional behaviour", to replicate in digital systems. And also to understand what choice and autonomy means in living systems.
If you think this is exciting, feel free to say hello at sureshbnarayan94@gmail.com or on twitter @iamaconstruct.
As a maker I generally play with ideas of how things work and how to make them work. Currently I'm trying to piece together the building blocks of life, even theoretically, drawing ideas and mechanisms from information theory, statistical physics, non equilibrium thermodynamics, control theory, dynamical systems, evolutionary algorithms, renormalization, scaling laws...
I have worked on many curiosity-driven projects. But I haven't found any of them as challenging as this quest to create life. Who doesn't like a challenge. Developing a fundamental understanding of life is central to my work, and will drive all my creations.
More broadly, the understanding of life is quite an important milestone in progress of any advanced civilisation. It is the moment that it can look itself in a mirror and understand what it is - perhaps even the birth of sentience as a civilisation. It gives the power of foresight to our actions and even perhaps the meaning of life. Life is central to the areas of learning, intelligence, autonomy, language, economy, social structure, sustainability, etc
Its importance is similar to that of the birth of physics, which described how the physical world worked and how to remake it. It led to engineering that built the modern world. So if we stretch out a similar path for understanding of 'life', we haven't yet reached the stage equivalent to Newton's laws and calculus. What follows this phase will probably be the most exciting phase in all of human history.
This drives my search to understand life. To understand what makes life behave magically compared to the rest of the physical world. While we all know that the environment shapes the organism, it is curious how they all behave intentionally at every scale. Currently I am trying to understand this "intentional behaviour", to replicate in digital systems. And also to understand what choice and autonomy means in living systems.
If you think this is exciting, feel free to say hello at sureshbnarayan94@gmail.com or on twitter @iamaconstruct.
