Neurosciences Institute 5, Carnegie Mellon 0

At the invitation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we incorporated a brain of the kind that we were just talking about into a Segway transporter. And we played a match of soccer against Carnegie Mellon University, which worked with an AI-based Segway. We won five games out of five. That’s because our device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It learned the colors of its teammates. It did not just execute algorithms. _Edelman

When you are making brains for robots, you need to follow the right pattern for what the robot is intended to do. If the robot is supposed to perform a human function, or play a human game, its brain should preferably be patterned after that of a human, to some extent. From an interview with Gerald Edelman of Scripps Research Institute and the Neurosciences Institute:

By proposing the possibility of artificial consciousness, are you comparing the human brain to a computer?
No. The world is unpredictable, and thus it is not an unambiguous algorithm on which computing is based. Your brain has to be creative about how it integrates the signals coming into it. And computers don’t do that. The human brain is capable of symbolic reference, not just syntax. Not just the ordering of things as you have in a computer, but also the meaning of things, if you will....

What exactly is a brain-based device?
It looks like maybe a robot, R2-D2 almost. But it isn’t a robot, because it’s not run by an artificial intelligence [AI] program of logic. It’s run by an artificial brain modeled on the vertebrate or mammalian brain. Where it differs from a real brain, aside from being simulated in a computer, is in the number of neurons. Compared with, let’s say, 30 billion neurons and a million billion connections in the human cortex alone, the most complex brain-based devices presently have less than a million neurons and maybe up to 10 million or so synapses, the space across which nerve impulses pass from one neuron to another.

Our brain-based device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It did not just execute algorithms....

Why is this kind of machine better than a robot controlled by traditional artificial intelligence software?
An artificial intelligence program is algorithmic: You write a series of instructions that are based on conditionals, and you anticipate what the problems might be. AI robot soccer players make mistakes because you can’t possibly anticipate every possible scenario on a field. Instead of writing algorithms, we have our BBDs play sample games and learn, just the way you train your dog to do tricks.

Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts almost always underestimate the importance of machine architecture when they fantasise about "human level machine intelligence." Machine intelligence acolytes often seem to feel that consciousness and cognition can be captured in an algorithm, and installed in a wide range of machine architectures. Unfortunately for that effort, intelligence is not algorithmic. Humans, as "intelligent beings", devise algorithms in order to help machines and humans accomplish goals more efficiently. But the algorithms are artificial constructs usually designed for specific tasks.

The same type of mistake is frequently made by "uploading enthusiasts," who think that human consciousness will sooner or later be uploaded into a more durable matrix than the "meat brain" it currently resides in. Needless to say, the problem they think they are discussing is not what they believe.

For an example of what Al Fin thinks is the most realistic "uploading" concept so far, read John Scalzi's "Old Man's War," a work of science fiction.

Interestingly, some British roboticists are beginning to devise parallel methods of machine learning and evolution, loosely modeled on biological evolution. And a company in Japan is offering to construct a "baby you" robot that looks like the picture of you that you send in with your order and $2215. Perhaps if the British and Japanese roboticists were to get together, we may soon be able to buy youthful robots that looked like us, that could grow to imitate us and learn to take one's place at dreary official functions?

Are you thinking about "Pod People", or "Kiln People", or other fictional scenarios you may have read or seen? Don't be too quick to dismiss the idea. Life is more fun when we inject just a bit of poetry, fantasy, and magic.

Special Bonus: A Wired article looking at another "brain architecture computing" project centered at IBM Almaden, that includes researchers from Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, and UCal Merced.