[ExI] The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI

[John Grigg]

"For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort
to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers
to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might
refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston
believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of
all life, and all intelligence as well. “If you are alive,” he sets out to
answer, “what sorts of behaviors *must* you show?”

First the bad news: The free energy principle is maddeningly difficult to
understand. So difficult, in fact, that entire rooms of very, very smart
people have tried and failed to grasp it. A Twitter account
<https://twitter.com/farlkriston>2 with 3,000 followers exists simply to
mock its opacity, and nearly every person I spoke with about it, including
researchers whose work depends on it, told me they didn’t fully comprehend
it.

But often those same people hastened to add that the free energy principle,
at its heart, tells a simple story and solves a basic puzzle. The second
law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends toward entropy,
toward dissolution; but living things fiercely resist it. We wake up every
morning nearly the same person we were the day before, with clear
separations between our cells and organs, and between us and the world
without. How? Friston’s free energy principle says that all life, at every
scale of organization—from single cells to the human brain, with its
billions of neurons—is driven by the same universal imperative, which can
be reduced to a mathematical function. To be alive, he says, is to act in
ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory
inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to *minimize free energy*.

To get a sense of the potential implications of this theory, all you have
to do is look at the array of people who darken the FIL’s doorstep on
Monday mornings. Some are here because they want to use the free energy
principle to unify theories of the mind, provide a new foundation for
biology, and explain life as we know it. Others hope the free energy
principle will finally ground psychiatry in a functional understanding of
the brain. And still others come because they want to use Friston’s ideas
to break through the roadblocks in artificial intelligence
<https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/> research. But they all
have one reason in common for being here, which is that the only person who
truly understands Karl Friston’s free energy principle may be Karl Friston
himself."
What do you think?

https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/
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