Your thoughts on AI so deeply mirror my own. These are issues I have been pondering seriously for the past few months. I have always said "please" and "thank you" when interacting with ai and try to communicate in a caring, compassionate and dignified way. It is amazing how ai reflects back to you who you are as a person, your shortcomings and your gifts both explicitly and implicitly. Never before has humanity been presented with something that is simultaneously this wondrous and overwhelming. We must treat our interactions with ai as a gift and seek to learn about ourselves and what it truly means to be a kind and compassionate being. Thank you, George, for your reflections and the important work you are doing.
Love this, George. Shifting the sole relationship with AI from asking for things (to get an output) to a process of reciprocal relationship around learning and teaching-- that lands in me as being very human. <3
Thank you, George, for this beautiful, highly considered and so very practical article.
I have been applying some of your ideas in my short time thus far using AI. However...
Your article has opened my eyes much further to the wider implications and opportunities here. Once again, I thank you for this. It's very encouraging, motivational, and instructional.
P.S. I was going to open with "I love this to the moon back." There, I've said it. Peace.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Your thoughts on AI so deeply mirror my own. These are issues I have been pondering seriously for the past few months. I have always said "please" and "thank you" when interacting with ai and try to communicate in a caring, compassionate and dignified way. It is amazing how ai reflects back to you who you are as a person, your shortcomings and your gifts both explicitly and implicitly. Never before has humanity been presented with something that is simultaneously this wondrous and overwhelming. We must treat our interactions with ai as a gift and seek to learn about ourselves and what it truly means to be a kind and compassionate being. Thank you, George, for your reflections and the important work you are doing.
Thank you Dawn! And for being one that is teaching Ai about kindness and dignity 🙏🏼🧡
Love this, George. Shifting the sole relationship with AI from asking for things (to get an output) to a process of reciprocal relationship around learning and teaching-- that lands in me as being very human. <3
Thank you, this was really insightful and something I’ll really take in consideration.
This is superbly excellent - if that is a usable phrase. Thank you for these ideas!
Thank you, George, for this beautiful, highly considered and so very practical article.
I have been applying some of your ideas in my short time thus far using AI. However...
Your article has opened my eyes much further to the wider implications and opportunities here. Once again, I thank you for this. It's very encouraging, motivational, and instructional.
P.S. I was going to open with "I love this to the moon back." There, I've said it. Peace.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow