How I Spent 720 Hours as an Edge Esmeralda Fellow

This is a guest post by Ivy Zhang, shared here with permission. The views are Ivy's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City. Read more Edge City Fellowship reflections from Jason, Janet, Anh, and Yogya.

Introduction

‍Ivy is a researcher exploring the intersections of open-endedness, evolution, and creativity. He is currently tinkering with urban science and how to embed electronics into everyday objects in ways that feel magical.

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Central learning questions: 

- How can we increase the open-endedness of AI/human systems?

- What does education look like with AI systems?

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My goal for Edge Esmeralda was to become a mini Paul Erdos. You know Erdos right? Like the Erdos Number guy? Anyways, he was a brilliant mathematician who would just show up at his collaborators' doorstep and announce "my brain is open". He'd stay long enough to work on a few papers before moving on a few days later.

So like every good artist, I stole his approach, shamelessly. I tried to go to every hackathon, project, and event while spending my evenings researching my central question: what does creativity look like in the age of AI? It's impossible to compress my entire month down to a few hundred words, but here are some of my favorite highlights.

At the Cosmos Institute hackathon, Alex, Brad, and I thought about how AI could enable smoother self-actualization. We built Lightweaver, an exploratory art/research project that would probe your life aspirations before embodying them. If you could see your fully realized potential, then perhaps it would help you become the person you wanted to be.

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I got to help work on Cloud Esmeralda, a fully offline solar data center. From aligning solar panels to hosting an online Jupyter notebook server, it truly was a full-stack experience with some of the greatest engineers and people I've ever had the chance to meet. 

In between all these, I built a Mixed Initiative Creative Interface (MICI) prototype called seedbed which helped people come up with cooler events to host at Edge by using both past events and AI to prompt new creative directions. To cap off the month, Alex and I made "hAIlighter", an online writing tool where an AI would augment your writing by highlighting parts of the essay that could use more work without telling you how to change it. Rather than replacing creative and critical reasoning, we dreamt of interfaces where AIs provoked deeper thinking and were more of a digital sparring partner.

At the end of 4 weeks, what did I have to show for it? A few fun projects, dozens more questions about the world, and a fervent belief that AI needs to augment rather than completely automate away human ingenuity. 

So should you apply? Edge asks a single question: can you use 720 hours wisely? If you found yourself in a beautiful, walkable town with an infinite supply of brilliant people and thought-provoking events, what would you do?

If your first thought is to focus intensely on one idea, go read the other fellows' blogs for how to do that. But if spending hours learning Docker, nerding out about The High Cost of Free Parking, then diving into papers sounds fun to you, then Edge is perfect. While each week at Edge has a different focus, you have the unique opportunity as a fellow to find all the odd connections and bridge disparate fields. Hope to see you next year! :)

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This is a guest post by Ivy Zhang, shared here with permission. The views are Ivy's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City. Read more Edge City Fellowship reflections from Jason, Janet, Anh, and Yogya.