The Evolving Artificial Organism

A taste of things to come, researchers are finally firing-up an artificial organism to record how it evolves from primitive unicellular origins to hyper-plexed associative memory network.

The artificial organism unfolds in a virtual world at over ten-thousand generations per hour (kind of hard to do in real life). We can then see how higher beings develop the ability to create associations, and eventually use this knowledge to build more intelligent robots.

Good thing olfaction is the prototypical primordial sensory system, because that’s why this new research is being posted right here. But think about this for a moment – there is no artificial nose. We already have the seeing retina, the hearing cochlea, and even a hand that feels. The nose however, has not been reverse-engineered.

There is a true challenge in replicating the sense of smell, and that is because our sense of smell is programmed by our autobiography. Smells don't mean much to us outside of our subjective experience with them. You just can't upload a dictionary of smells into an electronic nose and expect it to recognize random odors in its environment.

The only way you could do that is if you had a robot that grew up, just like a little kid, with multimodal experiences, social integration, and existential episodes, all associated together and built together into the tangled ball of nerve fibers that we call Self.

Your robot would then have its own limbic system, programmed by a childhood of interaction with the world. It would have to develop a life of its own, an autobiography. This self-identity would then be the substrate upon which the odor network is built. It could then recognize odors, as they would stimulate physiological and emotional responses and associative episodic memories.

Because smell is so tied to our limbic system, it requires a body in order to work. A cerebral organoid isn't a body per se. And neither is an artificially intelligent neural network. And neither is a robot that “comes to life” as a fully-formed adult, all booted-up and ready to go. Humans don’t do it like that. You can’t have a self without a history. (See Patient HM for more on that, however.)

What this new research now reminds us, is that not only does an artificial intelligentity need a body in order to smell, it also needs a lifetime of learning as well.

Notes:

Evolution of learning is key to better artificial intelligence

Sep 2019, phys.org

Anselmo Pontes et al. The Evolutionary Origin of Associative Learning, The American Naturalist (2019). DOI: 10.1086/706252

Post Script:

Finally seeing someone recognize the utility of studying olfaction in the context of machine learning artificial intelligence:

"Srinivasan says he will focus on how noise or variability in odor coding determines the balance between discrimination and learning, explaining that the variability the duo is finding in their work might be a mechanism for distinguishing odors, which could be applied to making better machine learning or AI systems."

How mammals' brains evolved to distinguish odors is nothing to sniff at

July 2019, phys.org

On Common Sense

Google’s new artificial intelligence team, based in Europe, will focus on the following areas: machine learning, natural language understanding and computer perception. In other words, they will be teaching computers common sense. And in other other words, they will be teaching computers to be four-year-olds.

Team leader, Emmanuel Mogenet, says in the BBC article that we are on the brink of a new era in computing. But what he says next I find particularly interesting - "A four-year-old child learns about the world through their senses so they know that cows don't fly without being told this. Computers need to understand some obvious things about the world so we want to build a common-sense database."

The sensory system of a child. That’s what we’re going for here. We need to make robots from scratch. That means making a machine intelligence that ‘grows up’ from a baby to a toddler to a child etc. This intelligentity would start with the neurogenesis of the human organism, and develop accordingly. It would have a sensory system akin to ours, and the capacity for ‘emotion’ in the form of a limbic system that would then drive its most basic decision-making practices. It would have an entire body and all of its parts, and they would grow with the life of the thing, this artificial human. Eventually, perhaps this creature will pass along parts of itself, to enter not only the timeframe of ontological development, but phylogenetic as well.

Number two, what does all this have to do with olfaction, if at all? I’m not sure exactly, but I’ll bet that revealing some of the mysteries of the olfactory system would be in concert with this enterprise.

The olfactory system is the limbic system, it is one and the same as the most basic computation undertaken by our non-artificial intelligence (what are we calling this now, human intelligence, natural intelligence, organic, wet, soft intelligence?). Perhaps there is a shortcut to this common sense thing that travels right through olfaction. Because I’ll tell you what, if a robot can smell – and I mean to really smell – then it can think like a human. And then we can sit back and watch as our whole civilization becomes that guy from Dune who floats around all day on anti-gravity sensors because he’s so fat.

Notes:

Google working on 'common-sense' AI engine at new Zurich base

BBC News, June 2016

Using stories to teach human values to artificial agents

Feb 2016, phys.org