Flesh and machines

摘要

The Problem: Although artificial intelligence has been very successful and is present, largely unseen, in the ev-eryday life of most people in the developed world, there still seems to be some things missing. Over the last fifteen years we have built behavior-based artificial creatures situated in the world like insects [2] and recently we have built robots with which we can have human-like social interaction [1]. But we never quite forget that these systems are machines and not alive. We build these models to better understand the biological systems, but the models never work as well as biology. On the other hand scientists have gotten very good at modeling fluids, materials, planetary dynamics, nuclear explosions, and all manner of physical systems. We can put some parameters into a program, let it crank, and get accurate predictions of the physical character of the modeled system. But, we are not good at modeling living systems, neither in the small, nor in the large. Motivation: Perhaps we are missing something fundamental and currently unimagined in each of our various models of behavior, perception, cognition, evolution, natural selection, morphogenesis, etc. If this turns out to be true then we will need to have some new ways of thinking about the issues of living systems if we are to make progress. This would be disruptive to all the sciences of living systems. As an analogy, suppose we were building physical simulations of elastic objects falling and colliding. If we did not quite undersand physics we