What Can AI Get from Neuroscience? (2007) [pdf]
neurolab.gatech.edu
neurolab.gatech.edu
I think deep neural networks running on GPUs will teach us more about Intelligence. Eventually, Neuroscientists will have to transfer ideas from machine learning to notions of how the brain works.
What makes you say that? It seems to me that that's the biggest thing, its connectivity, that separates the brain and its self/mind making ability from the rest of the organs.
These delays are a result of the complexity. Sure, replicating the knotted mess might not be an approach that works, but using the mechanisms that arise in the brain to handle complexity would be very useful.
Ok, thank you for the clarification. I still don't see why that's a problem for you. Is it your intuition? Practical experience? Academic knowledge?
I for one am pretty generous with what I think it takes for intelligence, or for that matter the universe its self, to emerge. I don't think the universe is at all constrained by our imagination.
Anything with a form factor or using hardware, is rather retarded, and useless...
[1] Of course, considering only the brain is wrong and reminiscent of the dualist myth. By brain I mean the nervous system, which is a open micro system embodied in a larger and also open macro system - the organism.
Planes on the other hand are artifacts, manufactured to spec. They rely on highly specialized and rarefied fuel without which they will catastrophically fail immediately. Their range in tremendous and they've become an integral part of the human species.
Or did you mean the difference between flapping and fixed wing?
We know a good deal about how the individual cells work at the molecular / electrophysiological level, and how simple circuits function; and we also have a fair understanding of the gross structural organisation of the brain.
It's the middle layer that's the big unknown: how simple circuits link up to form complex behaviours, but it's not an impossible problem. I suspect looking at the smaller nervous systems of invertebrates will give us the conceptual understanding of these interactions, which we can then scale to understand mammals. We're largely waiting on the technology to map these circuits, and the computational tools to simulate and analyse them.
Rather than being complex computation, intelligence is about flexibility, but it may be that due to the complex nature of our biology, all that flexibility is just a lot of inputs and outputs, in which case we're back to square one and the limitations of the body etc. In some odd way, intelligence is quite disappointing
I don't know if it's so much that neuroscience needs AI to understand the brain or not. I mean, maybe. I'm not exactly an expert on either, but I know more about AI than I do neuroscience. But my take has always been more in line with what somebody else said about how "in order to learn to fly, we didn't build a bird".
To me, that gets to the core issue. In order to build "artificial intelligence", we don't necessarily have to build something that works exactly like the human brain does. I mean, it's called artificial intelligence for a reason.
That's certainly not to say that studying the brain is worthless. Far from it. But I do tend to think that a better approach to building an AI is to just focus on building something that displays intelligence (however you want to define that) without worrying about whether or not it is essentially a human brain replicated in silicon.
Is there a reason to think that that is even a possibility?