Nature’s code…Natural Intelligence and a path to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence: What is intelligence?

Earlier last month, I attended the Automate event in Chicago. It was an exhilarating experience, much like a child’s delight in a toy store, surrounded by robotic dogs, a robotic bartender, and advanced machine vision technologies. I had the pleasure of meeting Deepak, CEO of Sabhya Technologies, and Dr. Merwan, a professor at East Carolina University. Our discussions revolved around artificial intelligence (AI), its misconceptions, hype, and its potential as a panacea for almost all problems. Deepak posed a fundamental question: what is intelligence?

As I was leaving McCormick Place, I observed a beautiful dog among hundreds of event participants. As the crowd converged towards two descending escalators and one ascending escalator, the dog initially headed towards the ascending one. Realizing it was the wrong direction, the dog corrected its path and rejoined the crowd. This act of adaptation, resembling human intelligence, sparked my curiosity about natural intelligence.

My nephew often points out that if we judged intelligence by a dolphin’s ability to climb a tree like a monkey, a monkey’s ability to fly like an eagle, or an eagle’s ability to swim like a dolphin, none would be deemed intelligent. How, then, do we characterize artificial intelligence? Ideally, AI would be in a state of nirvana, possessing comprehensive knowledge and an ensemble of all global data. Did I say data? Yes, we will revisit this.

Dimensions of Human Intelligence, Vulnerability to Artificial Intelligence

Intelligence is multifaceted, encompassing various dimensions and forms. Human intelligence, though just one aspect of natural intelligence, carries additional complexities—particularly the ability to manipulate and project perceptions that others want to hear, see, and believe, often concealing the true reality. The real threat is the ability of humans using AI to manipulate behaviors in others with far-reaching consequences. This will be akin to digital narcotics, digital dependency, digital-dopamine trigger of and digital abuse and can seep in every part of human lives, blurring perception with reality. Addiction to social media is just the beginning. ?

Today's challenge is to distinguish fact from fiction and value from noise. The bigger question is how we can embrace AI while preserving the beautiful ecosystem we inhabit. This requires moving beyond vast amounts of data to extract actionable information. Crucially, one of the most important aspects of intelligence is the quest to understand and engage with our environment. To achieve this, we must seek nature’s code within natural intelligence.

Given humanity's propensity for manipulation, understanding of mental status is an excellent starting point. By comprehending the dynamics of human cognition and behavior, we can better navigate the integration of AI into our lives, ensuring it complements rather than disrupts our natural intelligence and ecosystem.

Although my journey began over 30 years ago during my IIT days, where I immersed myself in the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others, it was my childhood friend, Dr. Indra Cidambi—one of the most renowned psychiatrists in the tri-state area—who fueled my passion for integrating AI into psychiatry and mental health. Understanding natural intelligence became a driving force for me.

Psychiatrists will attest to the importance of mental status, thought processes, memories, and other factors that affect intelligence. Stimuli received by sensory receptors pass through various memory layers, creating perceptions that reflect what is sensed. These perceptions can be viewed as a digital twin or neural twin of reality in living organisms. Natural intelligence is a manifestation of a “dynamic model” that constantly adjusts based on changing perceptions integrated with past experiences.

We are embarking on a journey to seek convergence among verbal description, vocal, visual, and other elements embedded in nature’s code. The deeper I delved, the more I realized that diverse living beings exhibit a spectrum of intelligence with nearly infinite permutations and combinations. AI can assist in sifting through complex and voluminous datasets, drawing insights based on models built from adaptive learning, empathy, and human intelligence.

Lessons from Nature

By adopting a holistic understanding through an interdisciplinary approach, we can detect and mitigate biases to prevent the misuse of AI by humans. Natural intelligence, when considered independently of human intelligence, is inherently free from digital bias. This natural, unbiased intelligence can guide the development of AI systems that are ethical, responsible, and aligned with the broader spectrum of cognitive and adaptive capabilities observed in the natural world.

Natural intelligence encompasses diverse cognitive and adaptive capabilities across living organisms. For example, dogs "visualize" through smell, bats through echolocation, and chameleons through color changes using chromatophores. While AI can mimic human-like behaviors, it is limited by our modeling abilities and relies on large datasets and iterative training.

Using AI responsibly is crucial for preserving our ecosystem. How we govern and apply AI technologies will significantly impact ecological balance and ethical practices. Intelligence exceeds the mere accumulation of data and information and involves the capacity to adapt, learn, and apply knowledge contextually.

By integrating principles of natural intelligence, we can develop AI systems that are ethical, adaptive, and aligned with environmental and societal needs, mitigating potential risks and enhancing the natural world.

Humans have excelled in creativity, harnessing cognitive, practical, emotional, social, and other facets of intelligence to achieve remarkable feats. For example, we have created computers that mimic the brain and planes that mimic birds. Recently, I saw an automated dosa maker (a South Indian version of a crepe) that uses a printer mechanism to "print" the crepe with batter as the ink. This is a testament to human ingenuity. I view creativity as the vector displacement between various independent clusters, and intelligence as the ability to model and create value within and between these clusters.

By leveraging human ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of mental status, we can harness the power of both natural and artificial intelligence to embrace AI safely and effectively.