I already spoke in an earlier post about how there are parallels between the way evolution works and the way AI works. Both depend on chance and necessity. But there is something else that computer scientists thinking about AI can learn from evolution. It is the importance of novelty arising out of cooperation.

In biology, necessity is sticking within the confines of the universal biochemical structures that “work.” In AI, necessity is equally universal structures of human concepts that must be obeyed to “make sense.” In biology, chance is how a mutation changes an organism in subtle or profound ways. In AI, chance is making a random choice in the way words are strung together and choosing something that, surprisingly, makes new sense.

But it is wrong to say that the result of either evolution or AI, just because they arise in part out of chance, is random. Regarding evolution, St. John Henry Newman famously remarked that what looks random to us may not be random to God. There might be a plan not in the development, but in what the development discloses. Evolution discovers what God has made possible. Evolution is about exploring the full range of living beings possible on Earth. AI, on the other hand, is about what we can discover in what human scholarship has made known to us.

The more recent developments in evolutionary biology have shown us quite clearly that concepts such as “survival of the fittest” in a “struggle for survival” were overly simplistic. Not competition but cooperation leads to newness in biology. We see it already in the beginning. The eukaryotic cell, the building block of multicellular organisms such as plants and animals, evolved from several prokaryotic organisms coming together as one. On a larger scale, consider plants and insects. These two species evolved in mutual dependence to bring out a more complex and cooperative biosphere.

I want to think about AI in a similar way. The most important possibility it brings us is to discover what we already know but never quite realized, on account of its dependence on different areas of expertise. It permits cooperation between scholars who would otherwise never have been able to learn from each other. I believe that just as in evolution, cooperation brought about newness and discovered new ways for life to live on Earth, AI can lead us to new insights into things we can know, just by learning what the scholar accomplished who is on the other side of the fence.