Gigaom AI Minute – July 6

Transcript

When trying to build an artificial general intelligence people often look to the human brain as a model of an intelligent system. There's a widespread belief that the reason we don't understand how the brain works is simply because of the high number of neurons in a human brain, something on the order of 100 billion.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only hurdle to understanding how human intelligence works. There is a small worm called a nematode worm--ten percent of all the living creatures on the planet are actually nematode worms--and it had its genome sequenced. Its brain only has about 300 neurons, and there's been a project, the OpenWorm Project, which has been for 20 years trying to model the nematode worm brain inside a computer. They haven't done it, and even those in the project admit that it may not even be possible. So human intelligence is more than a function of just the number of neurons we have, but something about the interaction that we don't understand yet.