Luke Muehlhauser: In some recent articles (1, 2, 3) you contrast “constructionist” and “constructivist” approaches in AI. Constructionist AI builds systems piece by piece, by hand, whereas constructivist AI builds and grows systems largely by automated methods.

Constructivist AI seems like a more general form of the earlier concept of “seed AI.” How do you see the relation between the two concepts?

Kristinn Thorisson: We sometimes use “seed AI”, or even “developmental AI”, when we describe what we are doing – it is often a difficult task to find a good term for an interdisciplinary research program, because each term will bring various things up in the mind of people depending on their background. There are subtle differences between both the meanings and histories of these terms that each bring along several pros and cons for each one.

I had been working on integrated constructionist systems for close to two decades, where the main focus was on how to integrate many things into a coherent system. When my collaborators and I started to seriously think about how to achieve artificial general intelligence we tired to explain, among other things, how transversal functions – functions of mind that seem to touch pretty much everything in a mind, such as attention, reasoning, and learning – could efficiently and sensibly be implemented in a single AI system. We also looked deeper into autonomy than I had done previously. This brought up all sorts of questions that were new to me, like: What is needed for implementing a system that can act relatively autonomously *after it leaves the lab*, without the constant intervention of its designers, and is capable of learning a pretty broad range of relatively unrelated things, on its own, and deal with new tasks, scenarios and environments – that were relatively unforeseen by the system’s designers? Read more »

Kenneth Hayworth is president of the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF), an organization formed to skeptically evaluate cryonic and other potential human preservation technologies by examining how well they preserve the brain’s neural circuitry at the nanometer scale. Hayworth is also a Senior Scientist at the HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus where he is currently researching ways to extend Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIBSEM) of brain tissue to encompass much larger volumes than are currently possible. Hayworth is co-inventor of the ATUM-SEM process for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale and he designed and built several automated machines to implement this process. Hayworth received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for research into how the human visual system encodes spatial relations among objects. Hayworth is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading and, through the BPF’s Brain Preservation Prize, he has challenged scientists and medical researchers to develop a reliable, scientifically verified surgical procedure which can demonstrate long-term ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain. Once won, Hayworth advocates for the widespread implementation of such a surgical procedure in hospitals. Several research labs are currently attempting to win this prize.

Luke Muehlhauser: One interesting feature of your own thinking (Hayworth 2012) about whole brain emulation (WBE) is that you are more concerned with modeling high-level cognitive functions accurately than is e.g. Sandberg (2013). Whereas Sandberg expects WBE will be achieved by modeling low-level brain function in exact detail (at the level of scale separation, wherever that is), you instead lean heavily on modeling higher-level cognitive processes using a cognitive architecture called ACT-R. Is that because you think this will be easier than Sandberg’s approach, or for some other reason?

Kenneth Hayworth: I think the key distinction is that philosophers are focused on whether mind uploading (a term I prefer to WBE) is possible in principle, and, to a lesser extent, on whether it is of such technical difficulty as to put its achievement off so far into the future that its possibility can be safely ignored for today’s planning. With these motivations, philosophers tend to gravitate toward arguments with the fewest possible assumptions, i.e. modeling low-level brain functions in exact detail.

As a practicing cognitive and neuroscientist I have fundamentally different motivations. From my training, I am already totally convinced that the functioning of the brain can be understood at a fully mechanistic level, with sufficient precision to allow for mind uploading. I just want to work toward making mind uploading happen in reality. To do this I need to start with an understanding of the requirements, not based on the fewest assumptions, but instead based on the field’s current best theories. Read more »