If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
– Carl sagan
Whenever I begin learning a new concept in technology, I think about this Carl Sagan quote. While doing research about machine learning/reinforcement learning, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole. What is DQN? CNN? a gym wrapper? Eventually I ended up on a video on linear algebra — after which I had the thought that maybe I’ve gone a little too deep. While in this headspace I began thinking about my deep seated fear of math. I also remembered how I wrote about having two eyes, and this helped me think about math in a new light.
A medium for thoughts
In the past few months I have realized how integral math is in life. It truly is a language on it’s own, a medium for which we can share certain types of thoughts and ideas. Recently I learned that long ago the idea of 0 was hotly debated in the world of math. People argued, “How can the absence of a number, be considered a number?”. Strange questions have been floating around my head as of late. If we didn’t have math, would we still be able to think about scenarios in a mathematical way? Is it the language (math) that fertilizes more mathematical thoughts? Or were these mathematical questions inevitable whether or not we had math to express them? Maybe I should have been a philosophy major.
One of us, One of us
Unsurprisingly, my post has deviated from where it began, something that I am wont to do. For my capstone, my team and I are researching and developing our own self driving car. To do this we are painstakingly scouring the internet for resources for information on how to accomplish this feat. Subsequently I have been reading a lot about things like neural networks. Essentially we have found a way to roughly emulate human structure by making neural nodes and connections with computers. For a long time humanity has made efforts to make computers more human, more anthropomorphic. I think this is because making a human is the pinnacle of what we can do. We have been the progenitors of nearly everything that we interact with today. The desk I type upon may be made out of wood, but the hands a person shaped it for my convenience. If an argument is made that things like desks are now mass produced, a counter-argument could be made that humans made and maintain those machines. Some fear that computers may become too human and take over the world. I think that it is a possibility, but more likely people will always be behind the wheel in some capacity. Much like how a plane nearly flies itself but has to have a human pilot to oversee it, computers are a tool. I don’t know if we will ever reach a point where computers can match our discernment, and levels of cogent creativity.
It’s been nice to air out my thoughts, but there is a universe to be made and I’ve only scratched the surface of how to make it.
