AGI & The Brain Code - Pascal Kaufmann

A Faith Misplaced

“There’s a good reason the first flying machines weren’t mechanical bats: people tried that, and they were terrible. - Dan Robitzski

In the current AI Spring, many people and corporations are betting big that the capabilities of deep learning algorithms will continue to improve as the algorithms are fed more data. Their faith is backed by the miracles performed by such algorithms: they can see, listen and do a thousand other things that were previously considered too difficult for AI.

Our guest for the third episode of the AGI Podcast, Pascal Kaufmann, is amongst those who believe such faith in deep learning is misplaced.

Rather than putting his faith in deep learning and other popular methods that seek to mimic the workings of the human brain, Pascal is taking a different route to create an AGI.

History seems to be on the side of Pascal. Those who sought to mimic the wings of the birds, to recreate them as they were, failed.  Even today with all of our technology, such a task will be impossible. Only after realizing that it was the profile of the wings that was important, were we able to create flying machines.

Pascal’s quest to create human-level artificial intelligence can be traced back from his founding of the Mindfire Foundation, to his creation of the software company  Starmind in 2010, to his experience dissecting fish brains at the Chicago Medical School and further back still to the time he learned about the Greek Titan Prometheus. His professor specifically instructed him to not follow in the footsteps of Prometheus, to not go about creating artificial humans. So he set about to do precisely that.

If he is to follow in the footsteps of the gods, Pascal must first crack the brain code.

A Grey and White Matter

“In one cubic millimeter of the cortex, there are nearly 100,000 neurons. That’s 100,000 microcircuits processing something. Humans have never made anything that complicated.” - Craig Forest

What is the brain code?

A simple and straightforward explanation the brain code would be: understanding the principles that make the brain work. To quote Pascal:

“I think we should look for the principals of the brain and not try to copy and paste the brain, because that would be impossible. You can’t simulate hundreds of billions of brain cells.  You need to look for the principles, and I think we’re lagging in good principles. We are lagging in basic understanding of how the brain works. If we crack the brain code, I think we can build an artificial brain.”

Pascal searches for the mechanism with which he can decipher the brain, to be able to read and speak its language and to understand its basic principles. Pascal’s quest, in short, is for the cipher of intelligence - and he knows how to find it.

The Mergence of Minds

We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain. - Stephen Hawking

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