Orateur
Description
Imagine a world where each "thing" comes with AI built-in. Your phone video app, to assure that you enjoy uninterrupted service, intelligently buffers the video and requests a varying number of packets ahead, using predictive models about you, the video you are watching, and the world. The mobile base station allocates frequencies, roams phones, focuses beams intelligently to serve all phones in the cell and to minimize energy consumption. This system requires layered decision-making, persuasion more than direct control, continually learned and updated world models and policies that lead to local, individuated systems which will evolve during their lifetime and across generations. The system will be more similar to a living organism than to a machine. To design such systems, engineering will need to go through a paradigm shift, inspired by modern developmental biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, themselves also recently going through paradigm shifts. I will sketch some of this latest developments, specifically Michael Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME) proposal and Mark Solms' Artificial Consciousness project, and how they inspire rethinking engineering.
