Lara Foster: We know the location and connections of every one of C. elegans 213 neurons… Why can’t we make a device that will do the same thing yet? Too much anthropomorphism?
Too much anthropomorphism is precisely what a lot of AI research looks like to me (Google [“cognitive architecture”] for the sort of thing I mean), although C. elegans isn’t a good example of what we can’t do. All it takes to climb concentration gradients is a biased random walk, and light-seeking is a standard project with hobby robot kits.
Building it the size of a caterpillar, let alone a flatworm, is a more challenging task, but not one of AI. (However, I would not be surprised if some AI researcher were to claim that smallness is the key missing ingredient, as has been claimed in the past for computational power, parallelism, analog computation, emotions, and embodiment.)
We don’t know how brains work, and our view from the inside doesn’t tell us.
Lara Foster: We know the location and connections of every one of C. elegans 213 neurons… Why can’t we make a device that will do the same thing yet? Too much anthropomorphism?
Too much anthropomorphism is precisely what a lot of AI research looks like to me (Google [“cognitive architecture”] for the sort of thing I mean), although C. elegans isn’t a good example of what we can’t do. All it takes to climb concentration gradients is a biased random walk, and light-seeking is a standard project with hobby robot kits.
Building it the size of a caterpillar, let alone a flatworm, is a more challenging task, but not one of AI. (However, I would not be surprised if some AI researcher were to claim that smallness is the key missing ingredient, as has been claimed in the past for computational power, parallelism, analog computation, emotions, and embodiment.)
We don’t know how brains work, and our view from the inside doesn’t tell us.