We can tell that someone is looking right at our eyes. If you put an image of someone looking straight at you through something like a jpeg image compression routine, there is nothing in the image compression routine that's going to guarantee that very solid things like data are retained. I've been finding it rather difficult over the years to define why I think randomness is rather important, and I think maybe the best way to articulate that is to say that things like the emergence of life, meeting the love of your life, things like that, extremely unlikely events, these are things that may never be generated by something that is fractally complex for example. They would certainly not be generated by a random number generator, but may be generated by a randomness of a much higher scale, which is what we encounter in real space. One way of looking at that is to think of those monkeys typing at their typewriters, and the fact that theoretically yes, if they were typing at their typewriters long enough and it was truly a random process that the works of Shakespeare would come out.
Knowledge space is friendly to knowledge.
Or to take it to an extreme point the rational space of Boolean logic is friendly to things that can be articulated in those terms. So, it's really important to look then at things that are not conducive to that space. My most recent work is a piece called The Giver of Names, and that work has ended up being in a way a kind of very personal research into the state of Artificial Intelligence right now, and in particular the notion of what intelligence is currently. Now that is a rather remarkably carefully phrased statement which has been misquoted recently by interestingly enough Time magazine to indicate that machines would become intelligent. What he is actually talking about is convergence of what machines can do, and what the word intelligence means to us in common usage.