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.


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