Powered by Blood

Anonymous Coward writes "Bringing us one step closer to becoming centrally-controlled meatbots, Japanese scientists have developed a device that produces power from the glucose in human blood. Theoretically, this technology (aka "Dracucell") could produce 100W of power. Of course, it can't produce that much power in practice since your body stupidly wastes glucose in maintaining homeostasis. The scientists propose that this devices could be used to power implanted devices. Now how many of you Slashdotters would it take to power my laptop? I'll buy the cola!"

Some Interesting New Products...

This is fantastic stuff! Pretty soon we'll see places like ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com] selling stuff to boost your glucose levels. I can see the reviews from OverclockedCafe 50 years from now -- "HowTo: Speed up your pacemaker with Glucose!" Plus, with the embedded chips coming our way, we'll probably be tapping our circulatory systems to power in-built PDAs or to watch movies in the palms of our hands on a flexible OLED screen.

Overclock Your Body NOW! Drink UBER-BLOOD(TM) XP!!

fp btw.

Re:Some Interesting New Products...

I've read through some of the comments, and I have seen jokes refering to diabetes, but no serious comments. I'm personally a little disappointed. I have a friend who's lived with diabetes through most of her life, and it is NOT FUN!

I can't count the times when she's passed out from too much or too little sugar in her blood. I can't even count the number of times she's told me how she's laid back in bed having a reaction, not doing anything about it because she just wants the nightmare over with. Luckily, she has a family that cares too enough for her to not let her do that. A device that would efficiently control the glucose levels, without daily and usually unreliable amounts of insuline injections, would be a godsend for her. Diabetes isn't just some disease that you can live with and not worry. For people with the disease, it literally is a daily struggle. They find ways to live with it, but they can't lead a normal life. She has blood clots in her eyes from the sugar build up. Wounds take about twice as long to heal on her. She's lost teeth because they are rotting from the inside. She's been told by doctors that she will be lucky to make it to 50. A lot of people think that "oh you just need to take a shot every once in a while. What's so bad about that?" Unless you have the disease, or know someone who does, you can never really know the horrors it brings.

Forget human batteries. Lets start focusing on real life-saving applications.

Re:Some Interesting New Products...

Wow, using humans as batteries, now where have us well informed geeks heard about something like this before? What a novel idea.

Re:Some Interesting New Products...

> more efficient to make ethanol out of that lovely sugar.

Why not just add a second extractor to get energy straight out of the ethanol already in your bloodstream?

What's that you say? No ethanol in your bloodstream? Well, put some in already!

What's that you say again? You drank three shots of Scotland's finest single malt, and you're not drunk because the extractor's drawing all that ethanol to power your laptop? Just keep drinking!

Re:Some Interesting New Products...

Maybe this is what they had in mind when they created Bender in Futurama.

I love puns.

Other uses

You know, some fly-by-night internet "entrepreneur" is going to spin a tale about how this pioneering new technology can help you increase the size of your penis. You watch.

Re:Other uses

Damn man, if blood doesn't increase the size of your penis, then what on earth does? Unless you've got some form of winch and rack system going on, in which case I'd rather not know, though it sounds like a nice hack.

Re:Other uses

Does anyone else feel uneasy with the work "hack" being used in relation to the word "penis"...?

Almost right...

I find that a wench and rack does it for me...

Re:Some Interesting New Products...

Pretty soon we'll see places like ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com] selling stuff to boost your glucose levels.

Forget that, man. Do you realize this means I can eat ALL the potato salad I can fit in my stomach. And potato chips and popcorn and pretty much anything starchy. For those of us walking dangerously close to the diabetes line this thing could be great! I could power my laptop AND lose weight at the same time. I can just see the Infomercials now. Of course, we'll need Dan Akroyd to do the voiceover....

Two cows

Leave it to the Japanese to find a way to create usefulness and efficiency out of anything.

Two cows [lotsofjokes.com]:

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowikimon and market them worldwide.

Re:Two cows

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the band, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

Re:Two cows

More to the point, cows (and other animals) will most likely be the first widespread application of this technology. My cat already has an ID chip, but that is completely passive. With a blood battery behind it, I could add a GPS tracker and transmitter, thereby answering the question: what *does* that cat get up to during the day?

With cows or other large animals, larger devices with more power would be possible. Perhaps a device to summon the cows for round up, or give them a shock if they stray out of bounds.

I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic

Riding the bus gets more dangerous...

Headphones on, he sits at the back of the bus. His mind filled with the music he loves as the tape slowly comes to an unexpected halt:

"'Cause I'm as freeee aaaaasssssss aaaaaaaaaa biiiiiiirrrrrrrrr nnnnnn." -Klick!

Callously, he eyeballs the passanger next to him. He thinks, "Kinda short, but chubby... About 11 Pints."

Glucose = sugar!

This actually is kinda neat. If it can run on glucose it probably can run on fructose/sucrose/lactose and a lot of other sugars..

This of course brings back bad memories of Biology and the "Citric acid Cycle" and ATP..

Re:Glucose = sugar!

"If it can run on glucose it probably can run on fructose/sucrose/lactose "

Probably not. Your body doesn't burn fructose specifically, it converts it to glucose first. Sucrose is a fructose molecule + a glucose molecule, so it'd have to be broken apart and the fructose converted. Your body does this all automatically, but then the point is moot, since it can (technically) run off starch as well, starch just being a polysacharide of glucose.

So in your body = okay, dumping the nanomachines into a vat of fructose wouldn't work.

Rusty Glucose

Dr Kazuo Eda, heading the research, said: "It is like the metabolism of food. Human bodies can process glucose and obtain energy. When glucose is oxidised, electrons can be obtained."

IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the process our bodies use is different from how this devices creates electricity, isn't there a different waste product? Or can our bodies still use rusty glucose? Or is oxidized glucose harmless waste?

I guess we just need to combine this technology with a form of fusion, and we're really in for it. Now drink your power aid.

Mirror [martin-studio.com]

Re:Rusty Glucose

I'm not a biochemist either, but this website [rpi.edu] shows the basic Glycolysis reactions and their output.

Basically, in this process Glucose + ATP is broken down into glucose-6-phosphate + ADP, giving off a net reaction of energy.

Without knowing the the reactions in the process that Dr. Eda et. al. have developed, I can only guess that the oxidized glucose will combine with the some other ions (such as a phosphate) and become waste products just liek any other in the body. I'm not really sure what happens to the glucose-6-phosphatea after Glycolysis.

Re:Rusty Glucose

Actually the reaction you describe is not very efficient and only gives a net gain of 2 ATP ( adenosine tri phosphate)per glucose molecule which the bodies tissues use for energy.

Glucose + 2 ADP + 2 NAD+ + 2 Pi -----> 2 Pyruvate + 2 ATP + 2 NADH + 2 H+

Most of the bodies energy is generated by the Krebs ( Citric Acid ) cycle in the mitochondria which generates much more ATP. The glucose-6-phosphate gets converted to pyruvate and enters the krebs cycle. show here [ucsd.edu] This give a net gain of 30 moles atp per 2 moles of pyruvate.

Incidently if you have sugar by products in your urine you should see your doc as you might have diabetes.

Re:Rusty Glucose

Your body produces the bulk of its energy by converting glucose to ATP by a process known as chemiosmosis [winterwren.com] (electron transport). It takes advantage of the loosly-bound electrons in glucose, and at one point during the reaction the electrons flow along the inner membranes of your cells' mitochondria.

The process the researchers have come up with probably uses the same effect to produce a current. The waste product? Urine. The same thing you'd produce if you metabolized the glucose yourself.

How about the opposite?

>The process the researchers have come up with probably uses the same effect to produce a current.

I wonder if this research can lead into the electricity in -> ATP/Glucose out.

People powering PDAs with a little blood or spit is cute, people running on electricity no farms, no food, no obesity, etc would be revolutionary.

Re:Rusty Glucose

Oxidation? Yes, actually really nasty stuff is produced:

2 C2H6O6 + O2 -> 4CO2 + 6H2O

That CO2 could suffocate you, and H2O is harmful by inhalation and is found in all known cancers!

In other news....

...a bunch of scientists made a realistic virtual world which could be powered by humans hooked on to devices that could produce electricity from the human body. And in other news....agents are looking for a couple of anarchists called morpheus and neo.

ducks :P

Re:Matrix?

So "The Matrix" was a documentary??!?

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

some interesting applications

• Self powered diabetes control systems. You can use the excess glucose into power, and when the level is too low, it can release a reserve of glucose.
  
• Weight loss implants. Eat all the chocolate you like, and then use it to start your car.
  

Re:some interesting applications

My sister could probably kiss you for that diabetes idea! That would let her do a lot of things, like hike Europe, without having to worry about her glucose meter running out of batteries somehwere remote or whether she could get more insulin should the need arise (I'm not sure if the storage idea would work though, as insulin can be complex to store/reproduce). I realize that she may never see it in that much of a normal use during her lifetime, but the idea that it could work would certainly ease her worry about passing it on to offspring. It will certainly give her some hope for other diabetics.

Re:some interesting applications

Does your sister know that you're offering her to random Slashdot nerds?

Newest diet fad?

Want to burn calories while sitting in front of your computer at work? How about shedding those extra pounds while powering your TV at the same time?

This way people will get an increased metabolism (since some of your sugars are being converted into energy for non-local entities), and they will be able to reduce the number of batteries and other power sources needed.

Just wait till the come out with some nano-bots that run off this process and will scrub the plaque off your arterial walls. That would be the killer app.

Re:Newest diet fad?

Want to burn calories while sitting in front of your computer at work? How about shedding those extra pounds while powering your TV at the same time?

This way people will get an increased metabolism (since some of your sugars are being converted into energy for non-local entities), and they will be able to reduce the number of batteries and other power sources needed.

Just wait till the come out with some nano-bots that run off this process and will scrub the plaque off your arterial walls. That would be the killer app.


This could be both a good thing and a bad thing. Firstly it will obviously save lives due to the pure fact of weight loss but will it replace exercise? I've done a lot of running this summer, partially it was to lose about 15 pounds I put on over classes. Now even with those extra 15 pounds I was not what anybody would classify as fat but I was out of shape and found the extra weight was slowing me down. Either way I haven't lost all that extra weight but I don't really care as I have really improved my conditioning (though not to the level of the previous summer when I did a fair amount of running as well). Either way my concern is that this will take away these peoples major stimulus for exercise by making them feel healthy with their smaller cross-section when they are in just as bad shape as before except for a reduced risk of heart disease and maybe fewer joint problems. Also if you consider anorexics(sp?!?) already what will happen when they can do it much more easily and conveniently with one of these devices/technologies I can see this as a huge problem when people run their bodies energy supplies into the ground with the touch of a dial in the pursuit of a pencil thin waist and end up starving to death while on a seemingly healthy diet.

stupid body

your body stupidly wastes glucose in maintaining homeostasis

My homo-status is NONE of your business.

I want the opposite

Give me an implant that uses electricity to create glucose, so that I can plug myself into the wall and not have to stop to eat during those long coding sessions.

Hey you Porky!

Would the morbidly obese qualify for US Department of Energy rebates?

Actual application...

Well, all the Matrix jokes aside, this does have some potentially excellent applications. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"

It involves surgery. YIKES! Granted, it is probably minor surgery compared to getting the thing put in there to begin with, but knowing it was powered by your own blood would surely be a welcome change to these folks.

I mean if you think replacing the battery on your motherboard is a pain, think of doing it on an outpatient basis.

Re:Pacemaker Recharge by Induction

Who says the batteries are near the thing? I think they string the batteries on a bit of wire far enough away so that the induction doesn't interfere with the electronics. At least, that's what I would do.

But that's not how it's actually done: the battery and electronics forrm a single unit, with the only leads being the ones connecting the pacemaker to the heart itself. I'm not medically trained, but I guess there'd be two reasons for this. Firstly, there's not a lot of room in the body for lots of components spaced out all over the place, and not many convenient sites to put things; case-modding to give yourself more room is not an option. Currently, pacemakers are installed under a local anaesthetic through a small incision in the chest; your solution would likely require a more difficult procedure

Secondly, there's always the risk that the pacemaker leads could be dislodged through even normal body movement: patients are instructed not to engage in certain activities (not lifting their arm on the pacemaker's side of the body above the chest, just to name one). Having another wire connecting a string of components just compounds that problem.

Ahhh, Gordon!

"Ahhh, Gordon, good to see you. We've found a way to keep your HEV charged, but you'll find you need the cola machines more."

Pacemakers

Could be used as a source of energy for implantable pacemakers and defibrillators, with the battery as a backup.

A bold step forward for Human Case Modding

There are those who mod thier cases and those who mod their bodies... but the lines are blurring. Soon people will be buying LED's and Dracucells to implant under their skin. Just think... You could implant a matrix of LED's in your back to operate like an animated billboard! Who will be the first beach-bum to add a cellular uplink so they can sell ad-space online?

Very useful right away, let alone in the future

There are already a lot of implantable devices for which power is a big concern. From simple things like pacemakers and sensors to more complex and experimental devices like artificial hearts, everything needs juice. One of the big problems, for instance, with some early devices is that in order to add more juice you had two bad options:

1. Have some sort of actual device sticking out of the body. This is bad, because it breaches the skin, our natural defensive screen, and such things tend to become very easily infected.

2. Surgery to replace cells. Again, any surgery at all is going to be both expensive and risk prone.

More recently, a third option has become available: having fully implanted power system that can be recharged wirelessly, via em radiation of some kind (you can google for it). This is a big gain, because it allows devices that are more power hungry while still maintaining the benefits of not breaching the skin and not needing frequent operations. But it still requires people to remember and have access to the appropriate charging device consistantly. If for any reason some one forgets or can't recharge, the device may shut down, sometimes with fatal results. So having a way to remove one more step for powering these things should really help improve the quality of life for a lot of people today.

Of course, personally I find this to be a very exciting development for future things as well. When we get to the point of having more optional implants, for things like boosting hearing or vision, a way to power them will be necessary, and if the power requirements are low, then this system would be perfect. Ultimately, widespread adoption of anything, from an OS to a vehicle, is all about making it as easy and intuitive for end users as possible. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on for advanced things like brain-computer interfaces, and people who are interested should look around, as the state of the art has advanced a great deal in the past 5 years. Here are a few links for the curious, and much more can be found with google, of course:

Graz University of Technology [tu-graz.ac.at]

Standford/DVA Neural Interface Project [stanford.edu]

Beyond the Big Barrier(lighter, intro type stuff) [man.ac.uk]
News Group:
sci.med.psychobiology [sci.med.psychobiology]

Homeostasis

I don't know about you, but I don't consider the maintenance of homeostasis in my body to be a waste of glucose.

This was done long ago

when Uncle Fester was able to light that incandescent bulb in his mouth!

Stop following me!

Now how many of you Slashdotters would it take to power my laptop?

Too many I suspect until geek hygiene improves dramatically.

Damn you, homeostasis!!!

DAMN YOU, HOMEOSTASIS!!!! You ruin all my hopes and dreams!

2000 calories/day - watts.

Theoretically, this technology (aka "Dracucell") could produce 100 watts. power.

In other words, on a 2000 kilocalories/day diet...

1 kilowatthour = 860 kilocalories.
2000/860 = 2.3 kilowatt hours
2300 watts-hours/24hours = 96 watts.

Pretty amazing that we humans only run on 96 watts of power.

why the premise of the Matrix is so dumb

the efficiency of conversion of biomass to energy by the human metabolism is very, very, poor. It's not that the oxidation of glucose is so inefficient, it's that there's so much energy spent digesting food to glucose in the first place.

Chickens and rabbits do much better. But then, what kind of a movie would it be if Keanu Reeves was trying to free acres and acres of penned hens? I know, it's about his speed. He'd probably get an Oscar for best supporting actor.

Er, as I was saying, the human body is not a very efficient producer of energy, and the amount of fossil fuels used to produce our food is staggering.

What would be more useful, in terms of the worlds energy demands, is if these guys could *reverse* the process... By putting energy IN to the metabolism, synthesise glucose from H20 and C02. Ideally, the energy source would be good old solar insolation on exposed skin.

So, lay around in the backyard naked for a few hours and save the money you would have had to spend on doughnuts.

This isn't too incredibly speculative, plenty of organisms do this already. The downside is, you'd probably be green, but if everyone was green, it wouldn't be so bad.

How many

I can see the jokes already:

How many airplane pilots does it take to power a laptop?
None. The use of laptops and other portable electronic devices is strictly prohibited during take-off and landing, acording to FAA regulations.

How many MIT students does it take to power a laptop?
Ten. One to blood power it while the others project a more efficient system.

How many Peta members does it take to power a laptop?
Two. One to power it and another to make sure they're not using the blood of any animal.

How many quantum mechanicians does it take to power a laptop ?
They can't. If they know where the power cord is, they cannot locate the plug. (BTW, where in the body would a power plug fit?)

How many Heisenbergs does it take to power a laptop?
If you know the number, you don't know where the laptop is.

How many women does it take to power a laptop?
No way. It's a man's job.

How many amish people does it take to power a laptop?
None. Amish people don't believe in Laptops.

How many Sysadmins does it take to power a laptop?
I'm sorry, that's a hardware issue and we can't help you with it. You'll have to get a hardware tech to power it. Good luck.

Check out the title bar...

"Slashdot | Powered by Blood"

'Nuff said.

Good for low power devices

OK, as many (perhaps to many) of you have pointed out, using enough glucose out of the human bloodstream to get 100W would be a bad thing(tm). However, the story isn't talking about taking 100W from the bloodstream, its talking about making devices that can transform glucose from many sources into electrictity. One of the mentioned applications is sugar-powered robots, in this situation it wouldn't be a problem to draw 100W, also let's not forget about larger than human sized animals. You probably wouldn't be nice if you got 100W even from an elephant, but slightly smaller amounts of power should be ok.

Most importantly, the whole laptop thing is a joke, this is not intended to power a laptop people. If used inside the human body, this would be to power nanomachiens (almost no power drain) and medical implants (which don't draw huge amounts of power either).

I don't think so.

You said "watching movies in the palm of your hand..."
Sorry dude, but I need my palms while watching movies. Ok, I can sacrifice one palm. nevermind.

The power cell itself just cured diabetes and more

I wish I had the money to patent these ideas. Instead I will disclose them so the whole world can use them if no one already filed a patent.

This is the cure for diabetes(sp?) as its an insulin replacement. It can keep the bloodstream below a certain glucose level with the greatest of ease, just burning off power doing something dumb (or useful, it doesn't matter). Just implant a device or series of devices that detect gluecose levels, and the device(s) stays idle or working in a low power mode until levels reach a certain level, then they burn off that excess gluecose until the blood is reduced to an optimal level. This is probably controlled by a slightly more complicated algorithm, but this should get the idea out.

It also is a GREAT and I do mean GREAT wieght loss aid. It can use up excess energy that the body takes in sending the body into ketosis, thereby getting the Atkins type diet, while eating whatever you want. There is also studies that show if you eat at "starvation" levels your whole life (when ketosis should be happening rather constantly) you increase your lifespan by 20% or more. Therefore, this is also an anti-aging device while being a near perfect diet.

The diet application does not require going into ketosis. It could just use much of the gluecose, thereby making it as if the person ate a smaller meal.

Should use more than glucose

This should be improved to use fats and lactose etc from the blood as well. I dont mind driving a small car powered by myself which is powered by Burger King. You get to eat all you can and you get to lose weight while speeding. I think I'll start a trucking company.

Re:The Matrix is just a movie

There was an interesting article on genetic algorithms in popular science or popular mechanics a few years ago (circa 1998 or so I think).

Anyway, the specific application being developed was designing an FPGA circuit to detect whether or not a tone (of a specific frequency) was being played. Genetic algorithms were being used to "evolve" circuit designs on a computer, then upload them to the FPGA.

It ended up being the case that the final design used far less gates than any human could reasonably design. And, none of the human EE's could understand how it was done at first.

After analysis, it was shown that the evolved design was using subtle interplay between different parts, and that analog effects from gates next to each other were affecting the results, etc... - all things that an engineer would not consider. (In fact, not even a good thing to consider because it wouldn't work on other FPGAs, even of the same model number, because of the subtleties of the analog interaction).

But, the point is that the problem was solved by a computer program, in a much more efficient (and certainly, "creative" and "outside the box") way than humans would.

Also, note that the humans couldn't understand at first (and took quite some time to understand) a relatively uncomplex system (a few handfuls of logic gates)...

If we assemble systems with orders of magnitude more complexity (millions of gates), operating in similiar ways, there is no way a human will understand it. At this point, it will "come up with" solutions to problems, and there will be no way for a human to understand how it is coming up with these.

At that point, how could you argue that the systems (computer vs human mind) were different, or that one were better than the other, if they were each solving obscure problems, and we didn't understand either?

Evolving Invention

There was an extensive article on this in the Feb 2003 issue of Scientific American. Very interesting stuff. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00073FC E-F36F-1E19-8B3B809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catI D=2

Re:The Matrix is just a movie

You are arguing that the brain is more than the sum of its synapses. This is one of the core questions in the fields of psychology and AI, and is being pursued by the top minds in each field. We will probably not know the answer until we can simulate the human brain and see what happens.

To back up your argument, you should probably know what the soul is and how it interacts with the physical brain, otherwise how can you say it's not a behavior of the brain?

Re:The Matrix is just a movie

I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you plan to simulate the human brain, make sure you simulate the IO in a manner the simulation can access naturally. Nothing would suck more than being a fully functional simulation trapped in a deaf and dumb computer system.

"I think, therefore I am" doesn't mean much if nobody else knows...

Human Arrogance (wasRe:The Matrix is just a movie)

You talk about intelligence, and being as smart as humans.

When you talk about intelligence, you are really refering to _human_ intellegence.

Do you not understand that what is considered to be intelligent behaviour is relative to your environment.

Do you understard that it would be very stupid for
- a cow in its native environment to behave as if its a hippopotamus.
- a human in its native environment to behave as if it were a bird.
- a computer in its native environment to behave as if it were a human.

Why would a computer think like a human, its not a human. It doesnt have a human body, or a human mind, neither does a cow, a bird or a monkey, but it doesnt mean they dont possess intellegence.

We shouldnt be so arrogant to only percieve inteligence as behaviour that mimicks ours.

If we fully understood the human brain, if we could predict behaviour based on the brains current knowledge and its environmental stimulus then would you still consider humans to be inteligent ?

Any technology sufficiently advanced appears like magic, thats what our brain is.
Just because we are masters of our computers doesnt mean computers are incapable of intellegence.
Just because we dont understand our brain doesnt mean it has a magic quality, a soul.

Re:The Matrix is just a movie

Have you ever heard of Cybernetic Poet? Or any of the music composing artificial intelligences? They regularly produce art which human judges mistake for man-made. Sure, it's not 100% indistiguishable yet, but it appears that with more processing power comes more 'correct' output. You are showing your carbon-bias. Your brain is really no more than a neural net itself (ok, it might have some quantum computing ability,but that is far from accepted fact). It just happens to be more powerful than artificial neural nets we can put together now. And, did you know (speaking of souls) that there is an area of the brain, that when stimulated electrically, causes the person in question to feel like they are having a religious experience? This goes a long way to say that artificial intelligences might well be able to experience the same things we do, if made sufficiently complicated.

Re:The Matrix is just a movie

Have you ever heard of Cybernetic Poet? Or any of the music composing artificial intelligences? They regularly produce art which human judges mistake for man-made. Sure, it's not 100% indistiguishable yet...

Yes, but both of these simulations work using patterns that were derived by analysis of existing works, which by definition always happens after the real creation already took place. Therefore nothing the machines produce is remotely original, they were just programmed to produce something similar by humans, who used their real intelligence to identify patterns that could be codified into a form a machine could understand. People do this too, imitating musical styles of past composers, for example. So in this way machines can be made to be sort of like people, producing new outputs from a fixed set of inputs, creating examples of rules.

The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist. Maybe it is an extension of something that existed before, or a synthesis of disparate elements. How do people do things like this? Much of it is based on intuition, interpreting their sensory experiences, and then creating something new. All this is difficult to define in terms of a machine. Even worse is the question, why do people do this? What motivates them? You have to simulate both the how and the why to create a truly creative entity. The machine must be able to create new sets of rules for itself, and must do so not arbitrarily, but for a reason. Aha, you say. The ability and motivation to create new rules must be defined in a sort of meta-rule! Right, all you have to do is understand the operations of conscious thought. But there is a showstopper problem with that notion - you must understand conscious thought from within your own mind, in terms of your thoughts. I reason by analogy here, but isn't there a mathematical principle that says that many systems cannot be proved from within themselves?

Otherwise, you get 'creative' machines as they are now, clever, highly trained parrots. Nothing more.

I will proceed further from 'interesting' into 'making people angry', and inform you all that my opinion is that artificial intelligence that has the creative capacity of humans will never exist. This is because I believe humans were endowed with their creative capacity by their Creator, but not given enough analytical ability to understand their creative abilities well enough to truly replicate them. Maybe if you have the mind of God you can create the mind of a human, but how can you create the mind of God if you cannot even make the mind of a human? I guess this ties into the concept of a soul, the part of our experience that we are aware of, but unable to analyze from within our experience.