On Memory & Machines

Mathematicians argue that it is a mathematical fact, that often the most rational way of making a decision is to simply flip a coin. No wonder, most of human and societal behavior borders on irrationality. But while probability is about numbers, as Glenn Shafer says, it is also about the structure of reasoning. Humans have an ability to execute a continuous manipulation of weight distribution over past events, affecting their immediate actions. Which brings us to the workings of memory and its role in intelligent behavior. 

Traditionally computers’ memory works by recollection through an elaborate system of instructions & pointers to retrieve data. So far so good. But since our goal is designing generality in computational “thinking” - let us look a little further into how a human encodes and carries information, and how it translates into actions. I suggest the readers to have an open mind while also carrying a healthy dose of skepticism, since we’ll be making some assumptions. 

Assumption #1: Memory stored is dependent upon perceptual processes.
Assumption #2: Information is discarded more often than it is stored.
Assumption #3: Good information recall is reconstruction with least bias. 

Two humans may display varying memory of an event they experienced together, depending upon association/encoding of relevance with the input information, the health of their senses and so on. Essentially, to move towards generality, an intelligent agent must have a memory model which supports an active inference mechanism, on top of its core observe-orient-act decision cycle. 

A fundamental idea is that an autonomous agent with general intelligence should be able to fulfill surprise-attention hypothesis. While it is always best to minimize the surprise a system might face, what surprises it ( and its attentional faculties) is closely related to its memory model, how what the system retains is structured and recalled towards optimizing internal as well as external states.

Magicians and veteran criminal investigators have long known the trickeries of human mind. Given misleading information, humans tend to misremember things, so reconstructive memory has been a dangerous rope to walk upon. While generative models are getting better at producing all kinds of information, it will be interesting to see how they evolve and how much so towards reconstruction as opposed to mimicking a classification. It is therefore, a rather interesting problem in machine learning and neuroscience research, to reconstruct an event/memory from the milestones of sensory data and internal states. Eventually this will be getting into the domain of agent’s belief management and causal directionality.

Mr. Feynman The Great has one of his lectures on YouTube where he talks about the computer as a file-clerk who is getting faster and better. He also discusses, almost prophetically, the nature and future of intelligence in machines as well as the dual-use characteristic of technology among other things. Anyone interested in these subjects should spare 75 minutes of his (or her) life to listen to the man. Surely he is not joking.

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The Matter of Minds

Electric-Ray fish is a soft smooth-skinned animal which has evolved to grow modified muscle tissues that generate up to 30 amperes of current, the fish needs this power to defend itself in the ocean and successfully capture its prey. Somewhere in 100-200 AD a Greek physician named Galen started to beat the head of his depressed and pain-ridden patients with a live electric-ray fish. His patients immediately felt better. At the time, this treatment was seen as some sort of black magic. Today neuroscientists see it as one of the first recorded attempts to influence the human brain through an external physical stimuli. Since then we have come a long long way.

Early psychologists in their attempt to put psychology on a greater scientific footing, abandoned the study of mind and concentrated on the study of behavior, reasoning that the mind isn’t an observable phenomenon but only behavior is. However as the neurophysiology behind human behavior became more and more elucidated with time, neuroscientists took the lead in cognitive domain and presented the mind as an emergent system that could be tinkered with. Very rightly, neurotechnological interventions have been termed as the “Weapons of Perception”.

As early as in 1973, computer scientist Jacques Vidal described a system comprising of a series of computers and EEG to control “external apparatus such as prosthetic devices or spaceships”. While mind controlled prosthetics are a reality already, various research groups are also vying to operate complex machinery such as battleships and establish secure mechanisms for neural feedbacks. For example there is a futuristic NASA project for sending to space an e-crew — a group of human minds uploaded into a solid-state electronic circuitry — this will not require essentials like air, water, food, medical care or radiation shielding, withstanding extreme acceleration as well. So the size and weight of the spacecraft will also dramatically reduce.

Elliot Valenstein, a noted authority on Brain Sciences while referring to various methods of psycho-surgery and their implications, had remarked that having direct control of another human brain wasn’t possible. Though as technological advances have yielded, there is a spectrum of behavioral change which is now being observed and executed in Neurobiology research programs around the world, radically affecting the medical sciences as well through the rapidly advancing practices such as DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation) and the newer variants of TMS (Trans-cranial Magnetic Stimulation) such as tDCS/tACS etc.

The present applications of BCIs go so far as to using brain waves to train the machines, as recently a group of researchers successfully trained a neural network on P300 responses of the human brain and demonstrated a new approach to Situational Awareness and more immersive human training for uncertain environments that contains shifting stimuli such as a range of firepower, friends, foes, information blockade and non-combatants. Researchers have also successfully tried to implant information in human cognitive memory and presented their observations at platforms like DEF CON.

The human body after all is an electrochemical system that uses electromagnetic fields in everything from cellular communication to the functioning of the nervous system. In his famous analogy while discussing the electromagnetic field interactions with biological systems, Allan Frey states that just as a radio in spite of being present in an ocean of electromagnetic signals is not affected by all of them until they are of the appropriate frequency/modulation - the appropriately tuned signal therefore could interfere with the functioning of a living biological system as well. This becomes much more feasible and easily doable with the advent of Neural-Laces and their possible commercialization by companies such as Neuralink – as it would, as Elon Musk has himself noted, dramatically increase the outbound bandwidth of the biological brain, thereby providing BCIs far greater usability.

In 1879, Edward Page Mitchell had published a short story titled ‘The Ablest Man In The World’ - in that story a man becomes a genius, a political genius at that, because of an intelligence amplifying machine implanted under his skull. Evidently, the future of yesterday has come to become the present day’s reality. The military interest in Neuroscience also arises from the rise of Artificial Intelligence technologies as Neuroscience could provide an architectural roadmap around human affective functioning for modeling emotional intelligence in AI agents as well as to allow machines to inherit human ethics.

Among a plethora of use-cases, the key Neuroscience application areas which should interest the armed forces are Performance Enhancement, Performance Degradation, Espionage and Synthetic Telepathy, Special Ops, and Recruitment. There are billions of neurons in human brain and neuroscientists want to figure out what all of them are doing, and sometime make them do what they want them to do because if the neurons are showing abnormal activity, it is medical science’s duty to fix them up.

There are a some technical issues which are being worked through techniques from computational learning - such as reading and interpreting the brain’s exact output – given there is a very high signal-to-noise ratio in what emerges out of the brain, from cortical to the motor activity – and also generating inputs which can stimulate the specific neuronal firing patterns. Notwithstanding the hurdles – the cognitive domain, after land, sea, air, space and cyber, has emerged as the sixth domain of warfare – the final frontier, is the battlefield between our ears.