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
As the rate with which how information is shared in a society increases, so too does its technological progress. In the Renaissance Europe, the introduction of printing introduced the era of mass communication - which radically changed the evolution of its society. Telegram, Radio, Television, Cell Phones, and the Internet have massively increased the connectivity of humanity - which has resulted in an exponentially increasing rate of technological progress that will soon reach the point of technological singularity.
What can we achieve if we further increase our connectivity? What if we don’t have to search for the right person to give us the information that we seek? What if we create a network that allows talents to work on ideas with the comfort of knowing that their IP and original ideas are saved on the blockchain and will be credited to them? What if such a network is used to connect the AI talents around the world? What would such a network achieve?
At the core of Pascal’s quest is the Starmind based talent collaboration network. The Mindfire Network matches questions with real-time solutions from direct human input, maps the expertise within the network, creates a dynamic memory to leverage critical know-how and charts and selects talents autonomously and at a global scale.
Pascal believes that the brain code is going to be cracked sooner or later, and he fears for a world where such an information is not made open source but is accessible to a privileged few. He hopes that the Mindfire Foundation will crack the brain code first, that the Mindfire Network will enable talent collaboration on a massive scale and that such a collaboration will put to work the power of thousands or hundreds of thousands of brains into decoding the human brain.
Recently, SingularityNET partnered with Mindfire. As the Tech Oligopoly monopolizes the AI talent, SingularityNET can leverage the Mindfire Network to increase the collaboration of all the talent pools of open access networks that are willing to unite under the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA). Such a network will enable the AI talent pool of SingularityNET to find the relevant knowledge, access the right people and collaborate to create new services and solve challenges that they cannot do so alone.
SingularityNET has already taken the first step to greater connectivity and communication. In SingularityNET there will be a mergence of minds. SingularityNET will allow its AI Agents to exchange information and value with each other without any barriers. As the communication networks evolve and our connectivity with each other increases, as our brains merge with the AI of the future, we would be able to transfer information to each other directly - from one brain to another. That information would include our recorded experiences, as we lived them. Which raises the question, how many AGI would you spend to experience walking on the moon? More importantly: what would we create?
What’s Next?
If you would like to learn more about Mindfire and how you can help, please click here. If this episode piqued your interest, we recommend that you check out the second episode of the AGI Podcast in which Dr. Julia Mossbridge explores the possibility of being loved unconditionally by an Artificial Intelligence.
SingularityNET has a passionate and talented community which you can connect with by visiting our Community Forum. Feel free to say hello and to introduce yourself here. We are proud of our developers and researchers that are actively publishing their research for the benefit of the community; you can read the research here.
For any additional information, please refer to our roadmaps and subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about all of our developments.
SingularityNET Releases Updated Roadmaps
Providing full visibility into our progress and core milestones for SingularityNET’s network architecture.blog.singularitynet.io
