Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
https://aatishb.com/myriad/lets-build-a-brain/In 1948, W. Grey Walter built two simple robots that could sense light and touch.[1] Much complex behavior emerged. That's where this idea started.
Watch the video.[2] It's very impressive for 1948 and tube technology. If you've seen an original Roomba, you've seen a similar level of intelligence. Rod Brooks went down this road. But it didn't go very far. There are severe limits to purely reactive robotics. It doesn't work well for anything that moves fast enough that inertia matters.
Fun historical note: the linked newsreel film was known about but unseen for a long time, then found by Owen Holland in the BBC Bristol archive around 1999. Either Owen or I sent it to Rod, to great enjoyment.
Film includes operator-moves-trashcan-with-foot, a staple of mobile robot clips ever since.
Walter himself mentioned the perceived complexity of a simple system to the observer, stating it "might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness."
> But we’ve just shown you how this apparent intelligence arises from the bottom up, with just four neurons and two connections. There’s no magic here. In this view, behavior emerges from neural circuits.
Isn't the conclusion here that very simple behaviors like the sparks are intelligent? I would say even a single neuron has some tiny amount of intelligence, and what the author means by "no magic" and "emergent behavior" is just a different perspective that minimizes it.
Take out the "human" and it's all just algos on a scale of complexity.
It seems like no one stops to ask, "isn't it kind of bad that we're developing this system of machine intelligence to be our code-writing slaves, without ever really interrogating the ethics? Maybe we don't actually understand how our own brains function well enough to assert it's not similar (especially as language goes) to these kind of weighted association graphs?"
Or even the "well we made it, so it's ours" responses, which we sort of answered a long time ago when we decided kids aren't property, but I digress...
They have sensors for the concentration of food and basically stop moving when it's good enough and start when it's low.
" The sparks that we assembled in this article are based on a series of thought experiments by the neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg described in his delightfully quirky 1984 book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology."
That is excellent work and well demonstrated by the article.