by JONATHAN TENNENBAUM
Pursuing the weaknesses of present-day artificial intelligence – what I have called the “stupidity problem” – takes us into the fascinating field of neurobiology, which in recent times has experienced a series of revolutionary discoveries. These discoveries have overturned many of the dogmas about brain function which shaped the early development of AI, at the same time suggesting revolutionary directions for AI in the future.
AI, the brain and the mind
How does the human brain function? Needless to say, attempts to answer this question have shaped the development of artificial intelligence from its beginnings in the 1940s and 1950s until today. The same goes for the somewhat different question: how does the human mind work?
The early expectation, that one might actually be able to build machines possessing human-like intelligence, found encouragement in three main directions.
Firstly, evidence that the functioning of the human brain and nervous system, while staggeringly complicated from a biological point of view, is based on elementary “all-or-nothing” processes of the sort that can easily be imitated by digital electronic circuits (see below).
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