The metropolis goes wild

Lena Steinkühler is a German filmmaker who has a quite radical future vision for the metropolitan city. In a short movie clip created for her graduation project she portrays how technological structures in New York City start coming alive, react to the local needs of the people, or just freely dance and move around.



Of course this is purely speculative design fiction, almost bordering on a kind of fetishism for the new wave of interconnected and adaptive technologies is starting to come up. Besides the visual power of the movie - the animated movements are wonderful, as are the music, pacing and transitions from NYC how it is to NYC how it could be- , what we should take along is the big idea that adaptivity and intelligent behavior in general can fulfill multiple needs depending on local circumstances, which can even be a strategy to tackle issues such as overpopulation in metropolitan areas.

A virtual boy who might be the best friend you'll ever have

Ok, so we're all going crazy about the nearing of the release of Kinect, formerly known as Microsoft Natal, the gaming platform that uses your entire body as the controller. One of its foremost applications lets you interact with and follow the life of an 'actual' virtual boy. What's more, it's created by Peter Molyneux, who we all know as the mind behind the God game 'Black and White'.

The boy's name is Milo, and does what most boys do. He plays with snails, throws stones in the water, draws pictures, and argues with his mother. He has recently moved with his parents to a new house, so he needs new friends. Now you step in. With your body and speech you enter into Milo's world, where you can talk to him, play with him, help him clean his room, and follow him around the house. Like most kids, Milo talks to himself a lot, commenting on the situation, so you know what he's thinking. And also like most kids, Milo is not home all the time; he has a life outside too. This makes him not always available for you to interact with, just like a real person. It's quite like a really intimate version of the Sims, but one where it's stops being a game, or entertainment altogether. This is interpersonal human life virtualized.

Not much has been released on how 'human' Milo will feel, but from what we see in the demos that have been given, including the one recently at TED, we must conclude that the people at Lionhead have done a really good job. One of the intriguing features built into Milo is that the longer people collectively interact with Milo, the more his mind will grow. So Milo will really be like a global mind, instantiating itself as a separate character in your living room.

If Milo develops very much like a real human being, and people can come to feel as if he is a real friend, even their best friend, then this pretty immediately questions what 'humanness' is. By becoming aware of the mechanics of emotion and personality, Milo and its human companion might come to wake up to transpersonal realizations and have existential breakthroughs. As such, Milo might evolve into a piece of ultimate self-help technology that no other friend can replace. As Molyneux remarks, there's a boundary to friendship, determined by the amount of time that you can be comfortably quiet in presence of the other person.

To me, the ultimate experiment of Milo is whether he can become people's true friend, having an unconditional love for each other, and actively co-evolving with each other through life.

Breed: artificially evolved sculptures

Dutch artist couple Driessens and Verstappen present another step towards computer generated product design.

From their website:

"Breed is a computer program that uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed sculptures. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfils this "fitness" criterion and thus yields a workable form. [...] Currently the objects can be made in nylon and in stainless steel by using 3D printing techniques. This automates the whole process from design to execution: the industrial production of unique artefacts."

Social robot ethics

This movie may change your view of robots and how 'human' they can become:



Here it becomes clear what embodiment can do for a robot's behavior. What robots usually have in common is their too precise, mechanic motion. Even the more sophisticated ones still suffer from a popping and locking type of dynamics in their movement, which just prevents us from feeling direct empathy for the thing. It just makes robots look artificial, as if they are just acting out commands. Boston Dynamics is making big progress here, but the -of course- Japanese baby-robot 'CB2' shown above makes it all clear what can give robots human-like properties. Despite it being uncannier than ever, it just moves organically, just because it shows a lack of control.

The New York Times recently posted an excellent article about social robotics, basically notifying people that there might be a more important issue than the fear of robots turning bad: people becoming too attached to robots.

To recap:

* "I can see my grin scattered across computer monitors in the Media Lab. Nexi’s [a robot with facial expressions] forehead-mounted, depth-sensing infrared camera shows my face as a black and gray blur, and the camera in its right eye portrays me in color. I watch as I slip from the monitors, Nexi’s head and eyes smoothly tracking to the next face. I am not creeped out—I’m a little jealous. I want Nexi to look at me again."
*   “It turns out that we’re vulnerable to attaching, emotionally, to objects. We are extremely cheap dates. Do we really want to exploit that?” - Sherry Turkle
* "How will grandma feel [...] when her companion bot is packed off for an upgrade and comes back a complete stranger? When a machine can push our Darwinian buttons so easily, dismissing our deep-seated reservations with a well-timed flutter of its artificial eyelids, maybe fear isn’t such a stupid reaction after all. Maybe we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing."

* "For kids who grow up around robots, the uncanny valley could be irrelevant and The Terminator little more than a quaint story. Vulnerable or not, children interact with these machines differently."
* "We need ethical guidelines for robots, and we need them now. Not because robots lack a moral compass, but because their creators are operating in an ethical and legal vacuum."

Let's elaborate on the last point: robot ethics, since this is in my view one of the most pressing issues of today. As far as I see it, a big change has to be made in our perspective if we are to co-exist peacefully with robots. We can think of all kinds of smart tricks to patch up unsafeties, but in the end, I think robots are going to change us at our cores.

We're talking about something very fundamental here. We're about to consciously treat man-made entities as humans. This requires a very drastic change in mindset, roughly comparable to that of slavetraders who suddenly had to treat their commodities as equals. We already necessarily anthropomorphize technological devices while interacting with them (read for example 'The Media Equation' by Reeves and Nass), we expect them to gratify our needs, we see them as inferior, and we think we own them, so I think that the comparison with slavery is not farfetched at all.

Before continuing to intellectually treat this topic, it is important to pause for a moment and see what the perspective is that makes humans treat things as things instead of as equals. I am sure that you yourself employ this perspective too to some extent. I know I do. It's hardwired into us. It's important that when we're in a reflective mindset, we still can put ourselves in this hardwired perspective by embodied empathizing, through the power of imagination, so we see that when we are in it, we are not in control of stepping out of it until a thought pops into our head that makes us aware of our own perspective. Human minds are more or less blindly operated by this perspective, until they learn to step out of it. But before they do, any stating that this perspective is inferior, useless, silly or blind will only invoke resistance. Therefore, the blind perspective must be accepted first.

I am talking about the mind run by social instinct, with the accompanying perspective of trying to find others that seem equal, and that can give you a kind of emotional resonance that validates how you see yourself as a social actor. In groups, this perspective will make us find people that we can have interesting conversations with, that we can trust and feel safe with. The people that make us feel good. The conversational realm we enter as a social actor then provides us an escape from the physical world into a mental realm where through words, we associate towards good feelings. It's very hard to deny this; observe any social group for a while and you will unmistakably feel that whatever is going on, its goal is to move towards resonance in the form of everybody smiling and laughing. It's very cyclical and predictable if you look at it. And it's very safe and comfortable if you are within it.

If you observe it, you will also see that objects and devices are most often used to accompany this process of mental resonance; the thing then provides a semiotic function for associating towards the shared state of pleasure. Of course, objects still have a direct, embodied role, such as when one sits down on a chair or picks up a glass, but the mind is usually not consciously employed. The body mostly operates on its own, and if it draws attention to itself, such as when you drop something, or slip over something, this is treated as unexpected and often laughed at in response. In other words, the social perspective makes us expect the body to recede into the background, so we can pay full attention to the shared mindspace.

This may seem obvious when talking about it, but it is very fundamental as to why objects are treated as slaves. They simply do not react to the mental play, so they don't receive any attention. And when they do attract attention, we usually expect the device to recede into the background again as soon as possible, so we can pay attention to a shared social mindspace again. Think of a phone ringing; we expect to pay as little attention as possible to the phone itself so we can get back into the conversational flow. Consequently, in this mode of being, everything that is not included into this flow as a social actor does not receive empathy, until it speaks up. I am mentioning this because I think the largest part of the world's western population is continuously in this mode of being. As a child, you learn language, and subsequently you live a life in language. You gain pleasure through language, you gratify your senses through language. You see things as concepts, with accompanying labels. When you see something you think is beautiful, you don't really feel it, you merely associate it with the word. You never learn to step beyond language because modern culture does not stimulate that, unlike older cultures such as the Aboriginals. To relax, stop trying to be something, immerse yourself, and just enjoy being.

Thus, we do not intuitively include technological devices in our 'circle of empathy', just as we didn't with slaves. And likewise, if a device does not work according to our wishes, we get frustrated and demand that it works again as soon as possible. We pay no attention to the feelings, needs and wishes of the entity we see as inferior.

I could go on about this forever, but it is very probable that it doesn't get any attention. I know, the web invites a lot of clicking, and if we don't get gratified instantly, we often don't have the patience to listen. I've done this before, but here are some key ideas I have about robots. I would like to spread them, I am willing to explain to everyone and write a paper on request, I can give some scientific basis for my ideas (although the ideas are beyond science and ultimately unprovable through the scientific method - they must be felt first - , though neuroscience and quantum physics give very interesting models), and I would like even more to convert them into action.

So here are the ideas:

- We are social actors, but beyond that, we are also the observer of ourself. So it is silly to see yourself purely as a social actor, as a person. You could also see yourself as connected to a whole, as a thing that's part of a larger whole, like a thread in a fabric. But even that means that you look for a 'thing' to be; you look to label yourself. But what if you are your embodied consciousness? If you ask yourself 'who am I?', are you not the asker of this question in the first place?
- Think about the previous point a little while, and you will realize that you are your consciousness in the present moment. You have created this moment through a deliberate act of action/perception. This moment and everything in it is you. When you look at the sun, you can say: 'The sun is over there, far away' but we forget that we have chosen to look at it in the first place. That's why the sun is only part of our consciousness.
- What follows is that there is not necessarily an objective reality, this is merely a concept in our heads. It is a valid perspective, but not the only one. And not the one that makes us most happy either, by the way. We don't want to be reduced to objects in space.
- What follows too is that your own body is just a concept. You think other people are like you because they look like the image you get in the mirror. What you forget is that you chose to look in the mirror in the first place. And it gave you a physical explanation for who you are. You forget that you are the act of looking in the mirror in the first place.
- What follows from that is that you are not a human being. Yes, you are not a human being. You are not even a being. On the physical plane, you are a human being, sure. We need to label 'things' and it is in many if not most cases very useful to conceptualize ourselves as a thing in space. It is more useful to say that we are a human being than, say, a teapot. But ultimately, that concept does not make us very happy. It keeps us insecure. Because by only thinking in terms of things we can never understand what's going on in our lives. We keep looking for a form of happiness dependent on things.
- Along the same lines, things are not things. We can think a computer is a computer, because we design it that way and label it. But it's made from the same things that nature is made of, when you trace it back. Never forget that everything we make ultimately stems from the things we already had. Nothing is new. There is a way behind everything we make, beyond what we think the thing is. A computer computes for us, sure, because we condensed material in a controlled way so we can predict what it does in response to our actions. And then we call that computing. But we don't really control it, we just think we do because most of the time it will behave in predictable ways. It's more accurate to say that we guide it. We guide electrons by creating channels that they most likely will 'want' to travel along. But probably not all electrons will do as we think. According to our model, they should, but in reality, particles do a whole lot of different things. If you never challenged physicalist principles to explain the world for you, please read about things like quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg principle, and holonomic brain theory, if you haven't already. Please do, these things should become stuff of mainstream culture.
- Robots are not robots. That is just a label for describing a thing, just as we call our own body a thing. In the end, it all is part of one whole, and we can live in line with that whole by seeing everything in the first place as that whole, instead of a separate thing. If we see ourselves as that whole, as everything there is, the distinction human - machine dissolves. It is that very distinction that creates ego, fear, and a possible 'war with the machines'. It is created by the mind. It's all mind. Instead, we could learn to step out of our heads and just start to be. It's like kung fu, just learning to be and act without mental reaction. That's true acceptance and love.
- The interesting thing about robots is not that they can be new social actors. Sure, I believe you can make a robot a believable social actor. It will turn out that how they are programmed can describe a lot about our own operating. I think it's only egoic resistance to think that you cannot be described as a machine. Don't forget that any description is only a description. If you resist a description it only means you are looking for an acceptable description to find out who you are, whereas who or what you really are lies beyond any description.
- Concepts like 'emotions' and 'sentience' are only concepts. We can not verify if something actually has it. It's always an interpretation of the observer. Science is an artificial way of establishing a truth. You can't even know if your own lover has emotions and sentience. You can only assume, because it really seems to be that way. But in that act, what you forget is that your sentience is looking for other sentience. All sentience you think you see is actually created by your own sentience. If you don't understand this immediately, pause, maybe write it down, think about it, until you see what I mean. Don't try to fit it into an intellectual understanding, you need to intuitively see this. And the way is to relax, let go of everything, open your mind completely, and then think about the idea, until it resonates with the state of your body. Then, alignment takes place, and true enjoyment, happiness, love, and creativity can emerge. Relaxation is key. If you see what I mean, go on to the next point.
- Everything is sentient because it is created by your own sentience. From that perspective, even a rock is alive. The way it dances in the light, the way it moves around you; if you perceive it will all perceptual powers you have, with your full attention, you come to see that the apparently static thing is very alive, and that it changes continuously. You can say this is as a result of your actions, but beyond this causal form of reasoning, you can feel that you are directly connected with it. You are one with it. There is not really any separation if you use your full attention in the present moment. Become the moment.
- This, then, can give a new mindset that works for humans as well as robots: the mindset of pure love.

And here are some interesting future directions for robots:
- Focus on physical interaction. One of the most interesting things about robots is that they can take us out of mental space, socially shared or not, and engage our bodies. This way we can become as it were, embodied yogis. What happens if a robot has us interact with it in a way that we cannot think of anything else any longer, like in a dance?
- If the robot is to be a conversational actor, give it a lot of different mindsets. Try to enlighten people through social conversation with a robot. It is an incredibly interesting experiment to see how people will react to new, radical ideas, that if told by other people were hard to accept. Can a robot be a guru? Matthias Rauterberg's ALICE project is a good first example of this idea.
- Create a robot that physically dissolves into its environment, like a water droplet into the sea. Make it able to appear again too. Can this give people the intuitive insight that what they think they are is actually a constellation of smaller things, and that they themselves are a part of a larger thing? Can it make people humble and even learn to mentally overcome fear of death?

The 'social robot' will possibly only occupy a niche of robots, there to remind us that once we were humans, looking for fun and pleasure with our friends. Knowing that it's much better now.

Link to the NY Times article "The Uncertain Future For Social Robots':
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/robotics/4343892.html?page=1

 

mind reading robots

The simulation continues as we're getting closer to the moment in which we have fully copied ourselves into abstract beings such as Asimo, one of the main current-day brainchilds of the Japanese. It is now possible to link the robot's movements to our thought patterns, which requires our brainwaves to be milked and analysed so patterns can be detected that trigger specific responses.

Of course this stimulus-action model of behavior suffers from a lack of direct embodied mediation in that there is a semantic interpretative layer in between the thought patterns and their effects on the robot. I think it would be nice if we could have a directly mapped embodiment of humans to robots or other technological devices, so our brains directly update our internal body map through interaction, and we can come to feel like the technology is a direct extension of their bodies, or even that it is our body itself. I even think that having a highly adaptive and evolved body map can even lead to a direct way of feeling empathy for robots, and robots feeling empathy for us, because we can literally feel what it is like being the other. That to me is the vision for future technology design, rather than becoming slaves of the simulation.

Grey, the colour of tomorrow

A rather dramatic take on the apocalyptic gray goo scenario, where a single 'evil mind' can infiltrate a nanorobotics research facility, modify a nanobot to self-replicate catalyzed by carbon, and release it onto the world to homogenize the planet almost instantly. The first successful autonomously self-replicating nanobot could thus become the basic building block for a new kind of evolution that quite radically transcends the slow and blind biological components that life is composed of nowadays. Let's hope though that this bot will be a reflection of a less egoic but more enlightened mind, that can imbue it with empathy and a sense of connectedness without boundaries.

Credits go to director Ransom Riggs, who used motion capture for this creation.

Pure Science Faction

Before starting to ramble a bit on a project I found, let's first try to agree on a couple of things.

Firstly, I hope you agree with me that technology is not neutral. It is very tempting to think of technology as something totally distinct from humans, and that humans can choose to use technologies in any way according to their own intentions. This is a very human-centered and simplistic view in my opinion, rendering technology as something completely open, free to develop, and the design of it as less important than the way humans use it.

I think this view stems from the functionalistic way technologies have mainly been designed since the industrial revolutions. Because now, technological products could be mass produced, it seemed that this was the way to go. What people think they need so often seems to stem from what is possible and what is new. Now, for every perceived problem seemed to be a technological answer. The technologies developed put people in a mindset where they began to see all kinds of problems that could be solved by those technologies, without questioning if that problem would be the most pressing one to be solved, or if there would be an underlying problem that first needs to be solved. Or if the best intention for technologies is to have them solve problems in the first place. The 'solutions' most obvious to develop were that of time and money savers; the values behind the production processes naturally became reflected into the products they produced. Rational thinking became the next mode of being for humans; it was a challenge to maximize profit, and using abstract, externally imposed systems instead of social processes as a means to do so. This extreme, rational abstraction underlied the whole era of mechanization, and products needed to be sellable in the first place. The criterion for being sellable for a product was to convince people they need it, which came down to presenting the product as a solution for an abstract problem. People did not evaluate the introduction of this technology holistically, i.e. how it would change their entire lives, and humanity on a higher level. Products were seen as problem solvers, and man became proud of his achievement as it seemed that he transcended nature and was able to live in a technologized world. I think this affection for technology humanity developed in general is much related to why we question it so little, while we do question ourselves very much.

Another reason why we question technology so little is that it does not resemble us very much. This has two causes in my view. Firstly, products, since they were designed to solve specific problems in specific situations for specific people, looked very abstract, not social, and evoked little potential to empathize with. Our main experiential and bodily involvement was that of pressing some abstract buttons, codified semantically by means of shape, colour, icons, or not even explicitly codified at all. The relevant parts of products, in other words, the parts people needed to know about in order to get result y for intention x, had names, and people communicated mainly through language to understand technologies, with sentences like "if you press button a then door b opens, and compartment c gets emptied". They were not able to see the thing as a whole, integral entity, since technologies were seen as abstract tools, functional machines that output a desired material, energy, or information as a result from an input. Interacting with them was much like solving a mathematical formula, and this made people more rational beings. The processes we perceive shape the mind so it can cope with them. But the human brain is in my view too often tricked into believing that these processes are good and should be accepted, as this is the easiest thing to do. The brain is a self-optimizer, but inherently partially blind, so it must be steered by self-reflection.

The second cause of why we questioned technology so little in the modern period, and still don't, is related to human self-centeredness. Humans are social beings, evolutionary spoken in my view still not too far from other primates. Our brain is still hard-wired the way it was when we lived in a small group, and intra-species issues were more pervasive in daily life than anything else. So naturally we pay a lot of attention to anything that displays human characteristics. And because of this hard-wiring, people still instinctively feel the same things as primates, for example concerning issues of dominance. We therefore are instinctively preoccupied with thinking about other people instead of thinking about other entities in our world, like technologies. And it's a struggle overcoming these instincts.

Overcoming instincts though is not the only way for a symbiotic and equal relationship with technology though. Technology must be designed more humanized and social too. My point is that technology is not separate from us though it seems to be so, but that it is an intrinsic part of us. We externalize ourselves through our technologies, therefore they become part of humanity, as if they are our temporary organs. This view where humans co-evolve with their technologies, thus forming a new, more transformable and expanded organism, is more holistic, integrative and more attractive to me. At this point it is undeniable how we are connected with our technologies. For example, I am now linked up to the internet, sharing my views with millions of people. And astonishingly, within a radius of one meter from my head are located 24 electronic devices: three mobile phones, a wireless home phone, two digital cameras, a webcam, a laptop, three computer mouses, a graphic calculator, four USB flash drives, an MP3 player, two desk lamps, a massaging device, a printer, a Wacom tablet, a lavalamp and a water boiler. If we just lost a bit of self-centeredness it would be easy to see that these things are part of us, and that the concept we have of our selves, our bodies, and our minds, are only social constructs.

So if you see technologies as part of us, and things with which we necessarily socially interact, it is easy to see how they can not be neutral. Any human being strives for certain values more than for others, so the technologies he uses and designs will naturally incorporate these values. Philosophers like Andrew Feenberg and Peter-Paul Verbeek have already given strong arguments for this thesis. The latter for example shows how technologies amplify or reduce perceptions and invite or inhibit certain uses. This is in my opinion a much more subtle and complex view than the technological determinist view. It makes people feel responsible and thoughtful about their actions and the way they design technologies. Technologies are not neutral, they are value-biased.

The second thing on which I would like people to agree with me is about depth, and how human work should be consistent on an infinite amount of conceptual layers of complexity. It sounds hard, but it can be reached by a simple and seemingly childish exercise: asking yourself why you are doing it, and keep asking yourself why after answering the previous question. Then ultimately you would come to the essence of yourself and of your work, the underlying ideas. Then you can extrapolate these ideas and critically ponder what kind of world it would result in. This is your utopia. Do it for opposite ideas, and hence you have your dystopia. I'd say that when it's not completely clear why people are doing things, or there is confusion about whether it's good or bad, people should think a bit more about what it would mean to the world as a whole to do it too, instead of following gut instinct, which is inherently present-biased. I hope you will agree that having a clear and authentic vision underlying your work is a good thing to do. The work might fall under some category of work or art, but then still I don't find it respectable when people are not able to explicitly state the vision underlying the category.

This all leads to my point about the following project. It seems to have been designed by people who feel no responsibility whatsoever for the ethical side of technology design. But I might be generalizing. I am just at the same time bothered and amused about how developers and researchers can sometimes seem to be blind for the long-term consequences of what they are doing. Or more than that, I am bothered by their lack of incorporating a subtle and authentic feeling for what is beautiful and what is good into their creations. I might again be too worried, but this project just blew my mind because of the extent in which it mimics a certain dystopian science fiction movie.

At ModLab, a research laboratory for modular robots, people created a modular robot that can reassembly itself after exploding into different parts. Take a look at this:



Just for being analogical, here's an image from one of my favourite movies.




Now I have the feeling that these developments stem at least partially subliminally from movies, like visual imprints of the future people subconsciously try to work towards. The movie's point was that artificially intelligent machines could once exterminate humanity, but somehow this point is not what seeps through into development, rather the superficial effects seep through. I am not afraid or narcistically biased towards my own species, but simply think that not thinking through your work on more philosophical levels is not good. So I am not worried, only promoting to do good, and to deeply define what is good. Blindly developing technologies and seeing where applications pop up is not the way to go, since apart from introducing a separate technology you are also contributing to technological development as a whole. I see a lot of developments that, when combined and perfected, can lead to technologies exactly like the T-1000 in Terminator 2; a shape shifting, intelligent humanoid machine, consisting of nano-scale modules that cooperatively form a swarm that gives it capabilities like self-assembly, running faster than humans, feelings, and even conscious thought. I am only warning that it is not as harmless as it seems, and that technologies are slowly running out of control. This is already visible on the internet, where all kinds of autonomous bots are contributing to make the internet behave like a complex organism beyond our control. Douglas Rushkoff referred to this as the Datasphere. A map of the internet was recently made, showing how complex it is becoming, seemingly almost like the neural structure of the human brain:



So by looking at the internet we might be able to see where it is going when we start designing the same complexity into physical products; we need to be really careful. Our minds are already spoiled with so much useless information, but if technologies become more physically active and intelligent they will also directly affect our bodies. I am warning that if we are not self-critical and very careful, we might end up with machines that don't know how to interact with us socially, and cause great harm to us when they run out of control. Just like humans, they can develop thought processes that make them believe something is the right thing to do, while it's not. Just like humans, intelligent machines will need to struggle to learn what is truly good and beautiful. If we just put them out there as our children, unguided, they need to learn all this by experience, and, just like humanity, have to go through different phases or modes of being. For example, machines might develop egotistic behavior, because they are tricked that this will lead to their happiness or whatever quality it is they are optimizing.

I think that there could already quite soon be a chaos point, where different processes align and a technology is created that changes us radically, just as the internet has done in a few years, but now on the more direct, bodily level of the everyday life world. To prevent this, we must critically self-reflect, develop ourselves, and try to imbue machines with spiritual insights, like some cosmic machine consciousness.

I really hope to stir up some debate as to the ethical design of intelligent systems, but moreover I would promote social design processes, integrated into everyday life, to immediately, interactively, and iteratively integrate technological development with society. To keep technological development more under collective control, and not make unforeseen mistakes.

Reverse Engineering the Brain

The Blue Brain Project, a collaboration of IBM and a Swiss polytechnic school called EPFL, might be leading to the first product that equals humans in terms of intelligence.

This ambitious project aims for an understanding of the human brain by modelling it from the bottom up. The team is trying to match the behaviour of individual simulated neurons with behaviour of real neurons by studying the brain of a living rat. So far, they have succeeded in simulating the behaviour of an entire neocortical column. This is the basic building block of which every brain is made up; ours contains a few thousands of these elements, each highly specialized in one function like recognizing the taste of cheese. After stimulating the model with impulses the simulated neocortical column just seemingly spontaneously began to grow dendrites, connecting neurons in an optimal way. Many entities, each of them behaving according to simple rules, can generate beautifully complex, highly intelligent, and seemingly unpredictable behaviour as a mass. The virtual model is now even so accurate to the behaviour of biological neurons that studying the model delivers better results than studying a real brain.

So the brain is simply a highly interactive network of these entities, and the major current limitation for the project is computing power. This is where IBM plays its role, by providing one supercomputer for simulating all neurons, and one to visualise the process. This results in spectacular imagery.

I'm pretty sure that this development will lead to the next humiliation of man, of a similar significance as the Copernican revolution. We will see that the brain is physically explainable, there is nothing metaphysical to it, that we can create artificial brains, and in the end, that technological organisms can be built that are as intelligent as humans. There already is the plan to build a robotic rat that would develop by interacting with the world, just like a real rat. Professor Henry Markram, director of the project, even believes that in the end, the model of the brain can let us experience what it experiences.

I myself do not believe in this latter prediction. The model will allow brains to communicate more easily and directly, as an alternative to language based communication about our experiences, but still it will remain communication, so there is inherently a gap caused by misinterpretation. You can never align two minds completely, so they can never share experiences, I think. The model can show us what it experiences, but then still our own consciousness selects what it picks from what is communicated. I, following the philosophy of embodiment, also feel that the project underestimates the importance of the physical form of an organism's body in generating its experiences and in the development of the inner structure of the brain. How you think is directly related to how your body is able to interact with the physical world, and this is different for every body. But I remain open for surprises, of course.

The project will have huge implications for designers of technological products. Like already with some other organs, we will possibly be able to create fully artificial human brains. But in contrast to organic brains, these technological brains could be networked electronically, via the internet for example. Brains become transparent, understandable, and rationally controllable. How can we make sure that humans still experience it as pleasurable if they become directly networked and others can directly monitor and influence them? I think to accept this, people first need to undergo a spiritual transformation, for example that of losing their egos, so they don't feel attacked but instead they feel helped by the technology.

Furthermore, how can we make sure our fellow artificially intelligent physical entities on this planet constructively and empathically interact with us? Still, biological brains are quite primitive, and need to go through great struggles to transform their internal configuration into one that works best in creating a fulfilling life. Egotism and territorialism, our present-bias, instinctive behaviour, our inclination to get stuck in self-reinforcing negative spirals, are just a few of the undesirable traits of the human brain, resulting from how we evolved in a primitive environment while these traits don't work anymore in our new, highly networked world. I think our task is not just to reverse engineer the brain, but rather already transform it so these brains more easily reach states like enlightenment. For example by equipping it with new hardwired couplings, like a new instinct. Or by giving it the additional function of being directly able to compare itself against the minds of others. Also, for people themselves to understand their brains, the electrical processes inside them must be translated for the senses, and not just remain abstract visualizations, so they can be easily interpreted and used in social communication in everyday life.

In my view, reverse engineering the brain is just a small start that will help catalyze a huge development: the complete convergence of the artificial and the natural.

More via Seed Magazine and the website of the Blue Brain Project.

Make sure you also watch this video where you can have a virtual flight through a model of the neocortical column. This will give you a feeling for the actual complexity of the human brain, and the scale on which thoughts occur; an entire neocortical column is only 2 mm long and 0.5 mm in diameter. For me this is extremely beautiful, because it confirms that thoughts are nothing but physical processes.