The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Overcome by the Watson Supercomputer
In February 2011, IBM overcame the disadvantages listed below, demonstrating the Watson Supercomputer, which recognizes patterns in text data to surpass the capabilities of the human mind.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
What Were The Tools That AI Lacked?
The handicap for Artificial Intelligence is that it lacks the pattern recognition tools needed to succeed. The study of Artificial Intelligence began formally in Dartmouth College in 1956 as an effort by a group of scientists to evaluate and mechanically replicate human intelligence on the assumption that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

Their objective was to write computer programs, which could finally create human level intelligence in computers and robots. Those early scientists failed to imagine that the mind operates by recognizing patterns in its own astronomically large memories.  Human intelligence is not a product of mathematical computation.  They also woefully underestimated the memory storage capacity required to achieve such an ambitious objective.

• In trying to match human intelligence, artificial intelligence attempts to replicate nature's coded behaviors accumulated over millions of years.
• In a human body, the DNA codes alone occupy cubic miles of pages.
• Apart from genetic codes, nature has assembled similar volumes of code in myriad subsystems.
• At the top of this hierarchy of knowledge, the human cortex carries memories of an evolutionary history and a lifetime of multi-sensory experiences.
• The nervous system accesses all this knowledge with contextual brilliance within the blink of an eye.
• Despite all its successes, the first undeniable AI disadvantage is that it presently lacks the means to store a comparable size of memory. Second, it lacks a clear strategy for instantly accessing this galactic memory store.

Can An Algorithm Be Controlling The Mind?
I am not a physician, but an engineer. Way back in 1989, I catalogued how the ELIMINATION approach of an AI Expert System could reveal a way by which the nervous system could store and retrieve astronomically large memories.  That insight is central to the six unique new premises presented in this website. 

These new premises could explain an enigma.  A physician is aware of thousands of diseases and their related symptoms.  How does he note a symptom and focus on a single disease in less than half a second?  How could he identify Disease X out of 8000 diseases with just a glance?  

First, the total born and learned knowledge available to the doctor could not exist anywhere other than as the stored/retrieved data within the 100 billion neurons in his brain.  The perceptions, sensations, feelings and physical activities of the doctor could only be enabled by the electrical impulses flowing through the axons of those neurons.  The data enabling that process could be stored as digital combinations.

Second, combinatorial decisions of neurons cannot be made by any entity other than the axon hillock, which decides the axonal output of each neuron.  The hillock receives hundreds of inputs from other neurons.  Each hillock makes the pivotal neuronal decision about received inputs within 5 milliseconds.  Axon hillocks could be storing digital combinations.  It could be adding each new incoming digital combination to its memory store.  The hillock could fire impulses, if it matched a stored combination. If not, it could inhibit further impulses.  Using stored digital data to make decisions about incoming messages could make the axon hillocks intelligent.

Third, combinations are reported to enable a powerful coding mode for axon hillocks.  Olfactory combinatorial data is known (Nobel Prize 2004) to store memories for millions of smells.  Each one of 100 billion axon hillocks have around a 1000 links  to other neurons.  The hillocks can mathematically store more combinations than there are stars in the sky. Each new digital combination could be adding a new relationship link.  In this infinite store, specific axon hillocks could be storing all the symptom = disease (S=D) links known to the doctor as digital combinations.

Fourth, instant communication is possible in the nervous system.  Within five steps, information in one hillock can reach all other relevant neurons.  Just 20 Ms for global awareness.  Within the instant the doctor observes a symptom, feedback and feed forward links could inform every S=D link of the presence of the symptom. Only the S=D link of Disease X could be recalling the combination and recognizing the symptom.

Fifth, on not recognizing the symptom, all other S=D hillocks could be instantly inhibiting their impulses. The S=D links of Disease X could be continuing to fire. Those firing S=D link would be recalling past complaints, treatments and signs of Disease X, confirming the diagnosis.  This could be enabling axon hillocks to identify Disease X out of 8000 in milliseconds.  Eliminating improbable (unrecognized) prospects to arrive at a possible (recognized in the past) solution powers the powerful inductive logic of the mind!

Worldwide interest in this website is acknowledging its rationale. Not metaphysical theories, but processing of digital memories in axon hillocks could be explaining innumerable mysteries of the mind.  Over three decades, this website has been assembling more and more evidence of the manipulation of emotional and physical behaviors by narrowly focused digital pattern recognition.  It has also been receiving over 2 million page views from over 150 countries.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
What Was The Size Of Human Memories?
Nature has transmitted the programmed memories needed to sustain life on an unimaginable scale. The evolutionary process logically assembled these in cell memories, testing myriad variations. The DNA memories of every living thing on the planet has digital, error-correcting, and self-replicating codes. Those vast blueprints improved with each generation, across millions of years.

Organisms, whose inherited traits were less suited for competition and reproduction, were eliminated and those with advantageous traits were reproduced. It was an enduring process, which had finally yielded astronauts and neurosurgeons. That assembled code of knowledge described the structures of humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
What Was The Competition For AI?
At the moment of conception, a single fertilized human egg contains information equivalent to about six billion chemical letters, which can be recorded in a thousand 500 page books. In a grown human body, with the DNA in each cell containing a sequence of over 3 billion chemical nucleotide bases, the total of those codes in the body would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times over with 500 page manuals. This was just the code in the nucleus of cells. Back in 1956, scientists attempted to imitate life, using computers with 1.5K memories.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
What was the Scale of AI Parallel Processing?
Human intelligence is supported by massive coded memories in myriad fields. During the eons that it took to assemble the DNA codes, nature also assembled ascending levels of knowledge in the immune system, the spinal cord, the reticular system, the limbic system and finally, the prefrontal regions.

Millions of potentially pathogenic organisms and substances had to be neutralized. Cubic miles of recognition code enabled the immune system to act decisively within the organs, tissues, cells, and cell products of the body by differentiating between myriad self and nonself entities.

Knowledge in the spinal cord coordinated muscle movements millisecond by millisecond to power the rippling movements of a centipede, the graceful steps of a dancer, or the soaring flight of a bird. Memories for myriad smells enabled the reptilian systems to distinguish between prey and predator.

Knowledge in the limbic system responded suitably to a wide range of events, which triggered anger and fear, or jealousy and despair. The computation capabilities of the computer cannot manage the pattern sensing responses of living things, based on knowledge assembled over millions of years of history and a lifetime of experience, play and imagination.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
What was the Scale of the Human Cortex?
Human intelligence added myriad new levels to animal intelligence. The great achievements in science and art are based on stored knowledge of millions of relationships between numerous fields. Every stroke of the brush on a canvass by a master is backed by a knowledge of the effects of line, color, perspective, texture and myriad details of the facial representation of complex emotions.

A work of art is only possible through immense inherited skills and those acquired over years of practice and training. This lode of innate knowledge adds cubic miles more of codes in the nervous system. Artificial intelligence has barely touched on these complex pattern sensing tasks.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Could AI Do Millions of Parallel Processes?
Artificial intelligence fails in the speed of knowledge retrieval. An animal mind stores billions of pages of code. This data is evaluated and acted on within milliseconds. Subconscious processes of your immune system utilize internal code recognition systems to attack a detected invader. The olfactory system, using an inbuilt knowledge of smells, enables an animal to instantly recognize a scent and sense danger. An escape plan is hatched within the instant in which a wild animal perceives a situation to be dangerous.

The action cannot be stupid. The animal should not head into the predator. In the tangled undergrowth of the wild, increasing distance from danger demanded uncommon creativity. Memories of a lifetime had to be recalled. A safe objective had to be chosen instantly. There are myriad options in often treacherous terrain, with impassable obstructions and life threatening dangers. That objective of getting away is even achieved by slipping into a safe sanctuary, inaccessible to the predator. Like the underside of a rock. Artificial intelligence cannot compete in the field of real time information retrieval achieved by animals.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
How Far Has AI Reached?
Over half a century, AI has traveled far. In chess, as in simple computation, a computer can beat a human. Expert Systems assist the industry with a wide range of diagnostic software. Robotic vehicles have independently traversed long distances. Optical character recognition and speech recognition have advanced enough to have many practical applications.

But, massive storage and simultaneous real time retrieval of multi-sensory data is still not within reach. Natural language processing suffers from that problem. It requires an understanding of language, culture, history and emotions to be able to translate a sentence. Imagine the vast knowledge of the environment needed for a robot to understand a simple context like “outside.”

Common sense requires cubic miles of knowledge. Which computer can store a lifetime of video memories and recall a single frame within milliseconds? To succeed, artificial intelligence requires myriad pattern sensing algorithms and the ability to extract contextual knowledge in real time from cubic miles of coded memories.

The Artificial Intelligence Disadvantage
Overcome by the Watson Supercomputer
In February 2011, IBM overcame the disadvantages listed above, demonstrating the Watson Supercomputer, which recognizes patterns in text data to surpass the capabilities of the human mind.

This page was last updated on 30-Dec-2013.