Machines won’t become intelligent unless they incorporate certain features of the human brain. Here are three of them
Source: What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex – IEEE Spectrum
The only example of intelligence, of the ability to learn from the world, to plan and to execute, is the brain. Therefore, we must understand the principles underlying human intelligence and use them to guide us in the development of truly intelligent machines.
These three fundamental attributes of the neocortex—learning by rewiring, sparse distributed representations, and sensorimotor integration—will be cornerstones of machine intelligence. Future thinking machines can ignore many aspects of biology, but not these three. Undoubtedly, there will be other discoveries about neurobiology that reveal other aspects of cognition that will need to be incorporated into such machines in the future, but we can get started with what we know today.
From the earliest days of AI, critics dismissed the idea of trying to emulate human brains, often with the refrain that “airplanes don’t flap their wings.” In reality, Wilbur and Orville Wright studied birds in detail. … the Wright brothers studied birds and then chose which elements of bird flight were essential for human flight and which could be ignored. That’s what we’ll do to build thinking machines.