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:
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."
July 2019, phys.org
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