The Advent of Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Singularity

 

 

It has been called the Holy Grail of Modern Times. It is a great scientific discovery waiting to be revealed and also a practical invention with momentous and far reaching consequences. It is the emergence of a final understanding of the workings of the brain and the nature of the human mind. This is in turn is the key to the creation of true Artificial Intelligence(AI) and the instigation of the much talked about Technological Singularity. It is the beginning of an era of extremely rapid and unprecedented scientific advance and technological progress, which will transform the world beyond recognition within the lifetimes of most people alive today..

Humankind has come a long way on its historic journey of understanding the world and the Universe. But there is a huge, glaring and very significant gap in our knowledge waiting to be filled. The people of this world are still waiting to learn about how the brain and mind works. A final theory of brain and mind will be one of the great, if not the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And in early 2014, the scientist Stephen Hawking together with some other top minds declared that, ‘Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history’. 

The puzzle of how the brain works and the prize of creating AI, are perhaps some of the hottest topics of contemporary times. Governments are pouring billions of dollars, euros, renminbi and yen into brain research and the development of artificial intelligence. And this is matched and even surpassed by corporate spending in the same areas. Hardly a month seems to go by without some announcement of another major acquisition of some AI startup by a tech behemoth such as Google for hundreds of millions of dollars, or the hiring of some big name AI researcher by a big tech company. The goal of creating AI and figuring out how the brain works is perhaps the most important and certainly one of the most exciting ventures of the age. A lot of resources, talent and attention is being directed towards this end.

The Coming Breakthrough

But there seems to be a conceptual blockage. Everyone knows what the great goal is, but there is little idea as to how to get there. The goal of creating true AI and working out how the brain works has turned out to be a fiendishly difficult and profoundly intractable problem. Many leading researchers asked when this final understanding of brain and mind will come, will quite often give an estimate of 50 to 100 years. And the same for the creation of true AI. Noam Chomsky the world’s most cited academic and someone who made some early important contributions to AI said in 2013 that a, ‘theory of what makes us smart is aeons away’. David Deutsch, a respected Oxford physicist and popular science writer wrote recently in 2012 that, ‘No brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do’. And this is a sentiment which is shared by many experts. Yet Deutsch concedes that it is, ‘plausible just single idea stands between us and the breakthrough, but it will have to be one of the best ideas ever’. A similar idea was expressed by Rodney Brooks, who was director of the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) AI lab, who said towards the end of the 1990s that there may emerge some, ‘organizational principle, concept or language that could revitalize mind science in the next century’. In the Fractal Brain Theory this breakthrough ‘single idea’  and revitalizing ‘organizational principle, concept and language’ is about to be revealed. And it will emerge from the most unusual of circumstances.

The Coming Breakthrough

But there seems to be a conceptual blockage. Everyone knows what the great goal is, but there is little idea as to how to get there. The goal of creating true AI and working out how the brain works has turned out to be a fiendishly difficult and profoundly intractable problem. Many leading researchers asked when this final understanding of brain and mind will come, will quite often give an estimate of 50 to 100 years. And the same for the creation of true AI. Noam Chomsky the world’s most cited academic and someone who made some early important contributions to AI said in 2013 that a, ‘theory of what makes us smart is aeons away’. David Deutsch, a respected Oxford physicist and popular science writer wrote recently in 2012 that, ‘No brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do’. And this is a sentiment which is shared by many experts. Yet Deutsch concedes that it is, ‘plausible just single idea stands between us and the breakthrough, but it will have to be one of the best ideas ever’. A similar idea was expressed by Rodney Brooks, who was director of the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) AI lab, who said towards the end of the 1990s that there may emerge some, ‘organizational principle, concept or language that could revitalize mind science in the next century’. In the Fractal Brain Theory this breakthrough ‘single idea’  and revitalizing ‘organizational principle, concept and language’ is about to be revealed. And it will emerge from the most unusual of circumstances.

AI emerges from outside of any Academic, Government or Corporate Lab

John McCarthy(1927-2011)

is credited with first using the expression Artificial Intelligence and made many pioneering contributions to the field. He said in an interview that there was the intriguing possibility that someone has already figured out how to create AI but ‘he just hasn’t told us yet’. John Horgan

who is a popular science author and staff writer for Scientific American magazine concluded from his numerous interviews with specialists in the field that, ‘Some mind scientists… prophesy the coming of a genius who will see patterns and solutions that have eluded all his or her predecessors’. And he quotes Harvard Psychologist Howard Gardner as saying that, ‘We can’t anticipate the extraordinary mind because it always comes from a funny place that puts things together in a funny kind of way.’ The current emergence of a complete theory of brain and mind and its revealing will make these statements seem uncannily prescient. For the Fractal Brain Theory, apart from being a series of scientific breakthroughs and a technological wonder; is also a remarkable life story and a fascinating journey of scientific inquiry & self discovery. The circumstances from which this exciting theory emerges will at first seem most strange, but after a while will make perfect sense. Because this complete and perhaps even final understanding of the human brain and mind has come into being from completely outside of any academic, government or corporate research lab. The story of the Fractal Brain Theory is the tale of a lone mind, working outside of any formal context or traditional institution. It has been an endeavour self directed, self instructed and self motivated. The brain theory has been formulated in and will emerge from London, but it will appear as a bolt out of the blue from nowhere, to revolutionize the worlds of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

  

The Science behind the Fractal Brain Theory

Behind the Fractal Brain Theory are three fundamental, very powerful and interrelated ideas; that are systematically applied towards the understanding of the brain and mind. This in turn leads to three major critical breakthroughs which make up of the main body of the theory. The three fundamental ideas behind the fractal brain theory are Symmetry, Self Similarity and Recursivity. And the three major breakthroughs comprise firstly a single unifying language for describing all the myriad details and facets of the brain as well as the mind. Our second breakthrough concept is a unifying structure deriving from our unifying language, which allows us to see how everything related to brain and mind comes together as a single integrated whole. Our third and most surprisingly theoretical breakthrough is the idea that all the various information processing of the brain and the many operations of the mind, can be conceptualized as a single underlying unifying process and captured in a single algorithm. Taken together these properties of the fractal brain theory are set to revolutionize the worlds of theoretical systems neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And so we’ll explain these concepts and breakthroughs more clearly and in more detail ...will be continue...