Neuro spaghetti

I made a question to myself: what kind of sectors in robotic are profitable nowadays for a researchers?
I came up with the following list:

• classical robot industry: assembly on production chains and heavy work assitance
• remote controlled application (UV=unmanned vehicle):
  • UV for the army: spy drones
  • UV for oil pipe inspecction
  • UV for space application: exploration and repairment
• house surveillance and security
• domotic: cleaning and assistance (i.e. food and medicine)
• hobbyst: the well know robotic kits, the most popular is the lego kit
• entartainment: animatronics and android like agents

Human have been using prosthesis from long time ago. The first complex prosthesis being developed were the glasses (whose inventor is still a dispute). Artificial limbs are even older : egyptians used them to restore walking ability to amputed workers.

Artificial implants became more integrated in the human body as our knowledge increased: from the contact lenses to the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant is one of the first device that directly produce neuronal signals into the cochlear nerves. It’s amazing if you think about it. The more we go in the periphery of the body the more the electrical signals are easy to reproduce. A german company called Otto Bock, recently managed to restore full gait to a patient with full spinal cord injury embedding a transmitter and a receiver to bypass the spinal rupture (photos from the fair in Germany).

Artificial retinas are also in a good state of implementation. The problem is that: where is our identity?

The brain is a neuronal network as well as our sensor-motor network. Cybernetic principle of the embodiment tell us that our “self” is the “controller” in the closed loop. We produce neural output and sense neural input. One could say: oky the brain is the central processing unit and if you touch it you loose your identity. But think about patient with some brain injuries\malfunctions: amnesia in any forms, corpus callosum removed patient (the well known syndrome alien hand) or with cortex disorders (schizophrenia) and many others. If I loose part of my memory, am I still me? If i loose one part of my brain am I still me?

If I transfer a body atom by atom into another location, I’m still me?

This questions are very hard to answer because we don’t know our boundaries and how self-awareness is implemented into the brain. Mirror neurons are an answer only for imitative learning.

Will we find the part of the brain responsible for sel-awareness? Or it’s just our memories, encoded as echo states into the brain?

Sveglio. Che ore sono? Non importa, so cosa devo fare: controllare i risultati del simulatore.

Sono due dannate settimane che ci sto lavorando, un mondo virtuale con agenti intelligenti che devono nutrirsi da risorse condivise.

Come possono organizzarsi, come può emergere un ordine da questo sistema caotico dove ogni agente apprende costantemente

e si comporta in modo non predicibile? Ho bisogno di zuccheri altrimenti svengo sono giorni che non mangio in modo decente.

Vado in cucina, un disastro, apro il frigo e afferro la bottiglia del latte. L’odore non è così allettante, deve essere scaduto.

Mi vesto di fretta e furia, esco di casa: la luce è accecante, mi abituo dopo pochi minuti. Mi trovo a disagio: è questa la realtà, sembra

tutto così artificiale, sto ancora sognando? Esco da Kelvinway e mi dirigo al negozio di alimentari più vicino. Devo attraversare la strada e allora prenoto il semaforo, le macchine al segnale si fermano e attraverso. Un evento normale e banale, ma certo! Un segnale, il rosso una convenzione, e l’autista si ferma.

La chiave è nella comunicazione intenzionale: ho voluto attraversare la strada ma prima ho comunicato la mia volontà attivando il rosso.

Questo mi ha reso più predicibile, e l’autista in base alla sua esperienza sa che deve fermarsi. Entro nel negozio compro un po di frutta, e mi sorprendo ancora: una fila ordinata per pagare alla cassa. L’ordine è così evidente. Dopotutto è vero, comunichiamo per ridurre l’entropia. Che follia! Ognuno nel suo ruolo, predicibile e prevedibile. L’uomo non ama l’incertezza, e la società è il prodotto di questo desiderio. Penso ancora al mio sistema caoitco, ora è chiaro dove devo andare a parare: la comunicazione.

Mio figlio ha avuto ancora un altro attacco. Sono preoccupato. Voglio rifiutarmi di credere: non può essere schizofrenico.

La maestra mi ha raccontato di strani episodi accaduti in classe: Paolo si teneva la testa fra le mani urlando come se ci fosse qualcosa dentro,

gli altri compagni piangevano. Gli episodi sono aumentati e gli altri bambini accusano un certo malore ogni volta che Paolo è in classe.

Ho deciso di tenerlo con me per un pò e fare qualche accertemanto. Il dottore mi ha detto che la schizofrenia è causata dall’ipofrontalità.

La corteccia prefrontale di uno schizofrenico manifesta un attività neurale inferiore ad in individuo sano.

Mi informo di più e scopro che i recettori NMDA sono dei recettori connessi alle sinapsi eccitatorie, gli schizofrenici hanno un attività ridotta di questi importanti recettori. Non esistono cure attuali efficaci per la schizofrenia.

Dio mio, come hai potuto far questo a mio figlio.

Il dottore suggerisce una risonanza magnetica funzionale (fMRI) che dovrebbe scovare eventuali anomalie. Durante alcuni esercizi cognitivi, la corteccia prefrontale dovrebbe essere attivata, e se ciò non accade nel cervello di Paolo …..

L’analisi avverrà fra 1 settimana, nel frattempo mi prendo un po di tempo con mio figlio per cercare di capire cosa non va.

Sembra così normale quando parla e gioca, non posso ancora credere che sia schizofrenico.

The title sounds strange, doesn’t it? But after reading my reflexion you will find the point.

First of all let’s introduce in brief the Turing test as reported by the Stanford enciclopedia  of Philosophy :

The phrase “The Turing Test” is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion (442). However, if we consider the more precise—and somehow related—question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes (“The Imitation Game”), then—at least in Turing’s eyes—we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game.

In particular:

Turing (1950) describes the following kind of game. Suppose that we have a person, a machine, and an interrogator. The interrogator is in a room separated from the other person and the machine. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the person, and which is the machine. The interrogator knows the other person and the machine by the labels ‘X’ and ‘Y’—but, at least at the beginning of the game, does not know which of the other person and the machine is ‘X’—and at the end of the game says either ‘X is the person and Y is the machine’ or ‘X is the machine and Y is the person’. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to the person and the machine of the following kind: “Will X please tell me whether X plays chess?” Whichever of the machine and the other person is X must answer questions that are addressed to X. The object of the machine is to try to cause the interrogator to mistakenly conclude that the machine is the other person; the object of the other person is to try to help the interrogator to correctly identify the machine

The problem I want to stress here is that identification is strongly dependent on the language we are using.

How can I infer that an entity is intelligent if we communicate in a different language, even more simple than let’s say a  verbal language? Let’s imagine that we are communication using a channel and the intelligent entity (a human or a IA) is on the other part of the channel. Let’s assume than we have a set of predefined symbols or (phonems) and the channel is full-duplex. How we can conclude we are communicating with an intelligent system (another human or a non human)?

There’s no easy answer to this problem: Luhmann suggest that communication must be based on a”shared symbolic system” but how we build it? Social interaction are based on the problem of double contingency: a mutual depedency of actions and expectations and so the shared symbolic system is based on this principle and also that social systems are based on communications and not actions. So the question is: can we really determine if the alter in the communication is a human or a non human when communication must be learned?

A very good example is the current research in progress about drumming robots, just to mention the last one i saw at BLISS 08 “Drumming with a Humanoid Robot: Results from Human-Robot Interaction Studies”: Kaspar replicate the human’s drumming but in a “social manner”: call and response interaction. The second study about dynamical turn taking: participants unconsciously adapted  their own behaviour to the capabilities of the robot. So if we are posed in front of this robot it could be remote operated or controlled by the interactive learning, we can’t determine it using this music communication.

The question is more clear if we think to the theory of communication as a mean to reduce uncertainty in communication:ego and alter in the communication want to be more predictable in the interaction (Charles Berger, Richard Calabrese) and to the constructivism theory of communication.

Those are the limit of communication, if we don’t share a system of symbols and cultura knowldge we’ll never determine if an agent is human or not or intelligent. If we would meet in future an “alien” we’ll have the same problem with communication, how do we solve the maze?

By behaviourism: if it looks smart is intelligent? if it does complex task is intelligent?

The concept of the intelligence as we pose it is so strongly coupled on the language that we will never solve this detection maze.