Creatures Caves

All I know is every time I read his blogs about the things he's working on with them, my head explodes... I'm incredibly excited, and a little afraid at the same time, lol... I still think if anyone actually manages to make the first real Artificial General Intelligence in my lifetime it will be him...

I really think he is on the right track with designing AIs that have to interact with the world the way a real creature does. Giving them as many inputs as possible that are analogs to ours, basically, a 'body' they can experience in as 'real life' a way as possible, not just a brain... From all we can tell about neuroscience, brains are just very complex neural nets, and just work with electrical signals coming into them from the body, and from those it kind of cobbles together what we think of as consciousness somehow as a reaction to all the inputs... Apparently, this is really just the result of a bit which works much like the decision making part of Creatures's brains (though of course with countless more neurons and MUCH more complex biochemistry) that weighs ALL the inputs, including ones stored in memory from learned experience, and makes decisions based on them (CAT scans have shown that our brain can make a decision several seconds before we are even aware of the decision we made in some cases...)

Coming at AI from the perspective of just trying to design really efficient puzzle-solvers like other approaches do, while it CAN make some great problem-solvers, I think will never produce what we would really think of as a real general consciousness. Even if it did manage something like that, any intelligence that did come out of such an approach would be very alien to us, and have a much harder time understanding ethical ideas or acting in a way that we might want them to if they get free reign...

An AI capable of feeling what it perceives as 'pain', as well as many other things common to real living beings, see like us, etc... would, at least hypothetically, be capable of feeling empathy and have an understanding of the world and itself more like our own... After all, our own brains didn't evolve in a vacuum, they evolved along with and as part of our bodies, with the main function to help us adapt and fulfill our needs more efficiently... For sure we would be able to relate to and understand it better. Hopefully having a lot more things in common will be enough to stop our inevitable war with the machines, or at least hold it back a while...