Advancing Robotics - Connecting the Dots

I am going to skip ahead of myself, past the few basic robotics entries I have wanted to make and jump to a topic that has been stirring in my mind for quite some time now. Not so ironically that topic is the mind, or at least the mind of a robot. Mostly what I wish to cover is theory; none of it is fact, very little is actually opinion, just theory. While I will be covering robotic AI of sorts, the reason the topic is theory is because the current human understanding of the brain, any level of brain, is still just theory.

I remember reading someplace that the most advanced microprocessors of the modern world are not even equivalent to the brain of a spider. I have watched television documentaries on robotics and seen how the collective "we" envision the future, but fall flat on our faces with its creation in the here and now. And then I have read articles by neurologists and on neurologists, and watched the documentaries on television, and have seen the news; and I understand why we believe the future of robotics is still the future, and why our processors are so weak compared to that of a spider. We do not understand.

Or rather, we understand large amounts of focused information, but can not see past that focus. There was a television show (I believe it was Beyond Tomorrow, but they are all a blur at this point) that covered studying the human brain and charting how the brain controls motor function. Scientists were using this with neuro-implants to allow patients (and a chimp) to control electronic devices. One of the studies showed the "brain waves" for a person rotating their arm (like a bird flapping motion), the odd thing was that the brain wave was only present during the initial upward part of each rotation, it went flat until the next time around. To the scientists studying this, that was the full signal for total muscle control over that movement. Pretty neat stuff.

Except a week prior I had watched a documentary on a scientist studying lampreys, or rather their spinal cord. Seems that a lamprey that is cut into two will have each section continue the swimming motion separately, as if the brain was telling the "tail half" to continue to swim and how to do that. What the scientist had figured out was that the spinal cord acts much like a "mini brain", controlling muscle movements independent of, and yet dependent on, the lamprey's brain. The spinal cord for a lamprey is "muscle memory". Same as in a human, and every other creature out there with a central nervous system.

Connecting the dots, which is something I always have been good at (even if I never could color in the lines); the brain waves the neurologists saw with rotating the arm really were not controlling the muscles. Instead it was a signal, a code of sorts that traveled to other parts of the brain and the spinal cord saying "rotate the right arm clockwise". The spinal cord then took over and told each muscle what to do with separate signals, sending a return signal back to the conscious brain saying "ok, done". While that was going on, and mind you it really is only a fraction of a second to rotate your arm, your conscious brain was free to do other things.

Did the light bulb go on there? Take that out to the next level. How does a creature see? What is vision? The eye is a sensor; it turns light into some sort of signal. Your brain does not process it all; or rather the conscious part of your brain can not be bothered with it. It only sees a tiny fraction of all the data. There is a part of your brain that takes optic information from your eye and does all sorts of data manipulation with it, pulling and pushing data all over the brain between memories, to subconscious eye movements, to focusing the lenses; all before any data is sent to the conscious mind to be processed. It even goes so far as to determine what, if anything, is important in the images it is collecting that the conscious brain should be aware of. It might even cause an override of muscle control without giving the conscious brain the chance to say "wait". This is why we duck when something is thrown at our head.

Audio, tactile, scent; the list goes on for sensor inputs with each having its own independent processing unit inside each brain. Muscle control, involuntary responses, muscle memory, autonomic functions (heart beating, breathing), gland control, temperature regulation, and on, and on, and on. The brain is not just medulla, cerebellum and cerebrum anymore, it never was just that. There are more individual parts to a spider's brain than sentences in this entry, and each one is autonomous, each acts on its own, but all act in concert with one another.

There might not be a single processor as powerful as the brain of a spider, but there is not a single portion of a spider's brain that is as powerful as a processor from ten years past. That is my theory. If we all start connecting the dots a little more, instead of just making larger dots, that theory will soon become robotic AI fact.