17 April

I think by far the most interesting thing to come out of artificial intelligence and robot research is the changes it forces in our ideas about thinking more generally. For example it was only when people tried to build vision for robots that they realised our ideas about vision are hopeless. I love that more recently, researchers realised that nothing can think if it also can’t FEEL. And not separately - they don’t mean add a ‘feeling chip’ to the thinking chips. They discovered that thinking and feeling can’t be separated. Which changes so many of the assumptions of all of neuroscience and psychology too. When you ‘think’ you are feeling too, but not separately, they’re the same activity. There is no ‘feeling centre’ in the brain, not in the amygdala for example, as often thought, feeling/thinking involves all of us acting together at once.