To bring something to life, add imagination and stir

How do you bring something to life? Start by telling a good story, then endow your creation with its own sense of imagination, writes Ed Finn, director of ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, in a column for The Huffington Post.

Finn’s article is a response to the artist Theo Jansen’s TED talk about his strandbeests – wind-powered robots that circulate endlessly along the beaches of the Netherlands. The article is part of TEDWeekends, a weekly Huffington Post column that uses provocative TED talks to start broad, public conversations about intriguing and ambitious ideas. Jansen sees the strandbeests as a new form of life with their own unique (engineered) genetic code and way of experiencing and interacting with the world around them.

Finn argues that human efforts to engineer new forms of life through robotics and artificial intelligence are driven by a desire for connection. We are always searching for signs of intelligence, volition and desire in our creations: “seeing, or thinking we see, another mind at work makes it all real. Imagination brings meaning to those wind-blown contraptions meandering along the beach.”

Finn concludes that we don’t need human-like voices or faces to explore new types of relationships with the things we create. Instead, we are inspired when the creatures we create have their own sense of the world and the ability to create their own stories.