In many respects, Meca Sapiens follows an unusual approach to achieve the essential goals of Artificial Intelligence.
Singular Focus
The Wright brothers wanted to build an airplane that could fly, not a plane that could deliver the mail. In the early days of aviation, getting a machine to fly, whether that was useful or not, was the sole overriding goal of the quest. We live in similar times today with respect to Artificial Intelligence. However, the spirit that animated the pioneers of aviation has disappeared from the globally connected AI establishment. Today, hundreds of AI professionals publish thousands of articles containing incomplete results or microscopic “contributions”. Others are coaxing droplets of utilitarian software from massive computations and hyping these up. And let’s not forget the growing crowd of ethicists peppering AI with their countless “concerns”. As a result, the AI community produces a massive amount of minute “results” that are more an impediment to the original quest of AI than a facilitator.
I don’t participate in this collective production since it detracts from the quest. In the Meca Sapiens project, I pursue the AI quest by focusing solely on what is essential and ignoring everything else both in terms of content and format. This means uncovering complete solutions that are based on very few, well-known concepts even if it takes decades to do so. As a result, Meca Sapiens is separate from mainstream AI and must stand on its own merits.
Consciousness is an observable system capability
Mainstream globalist AI defines consciousness in terms of the human subjective experience (through qualia and similar concepts) and attempts to replicate, in synthetic systems, the internal human experience of being conscious. In Meca Sapiens, consciousness is an externally observable system capability that is currently present only in humans but is not inherently bound to the human experience.
Emotions are internal control mechanisms.
Mainstream researchers often hold that a system must experience emotions to be conscious. This “inner life” of subjective sensations is, for them, an essential component of consciousness. This, in my view, reflects a primitive understanding of humans and of systems. In Meca Sapiens, emotions and sensations are (relatively coarse) behavior control mechanisms. They signal a change of state in the organism and orient its behavior. Humans “intuitively perceive” the presence of emotions in other humans and in similar looking organisms such as domestic animals. They do not “sense”, as emotions, similar states in systems that are very different from them such as lobsters and cities.
Implementing consciousness is not overly difficult.
For the global AI community, Artificial Consciousness is the ultimate frontier. It is a capability of such extreme complexity that it will only be achieved in the far future and after every other aspect of intelligence has been implemented. This belief is another indicator of the collective limitations of globalist AI. It results from a conflation between the elevated social status of consciousness and its technical difficulty. In reality, unbounded open-ended learning is more difficult to achieve than consciousness.
Computer specific implementation
Big AI seeks to achieve its goals by implementing structures, such as neural networks, that superficially mimic the human brain. In Meca Sapiens, the specific architecture and capabilities of standard computers are entirely sufficient to generate all aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Stochastic optimizers such as Neural Networks are certainly useful but as components. Replicating neural structures is not inherently necessary.
Engineered, analytical design
The global AI community believes that the processes that generate human intelligence are beyond analytical description. They think these mysterious capabilities can only emerge from massive computation. The Meca Sapiens position is that the belief that advanced cognition can emerge from random interactions and superficial similarities between neural nets and brains is a modern form of the “Cargo Cult”. The most advanced cognitive processes can and must be explicitly uncovered and analytically described using the tools of Mathematics and Systems Analysis. I have already defined consciousness explicitly in the Meca Sapiens system architecture. I am currently researching the mathematical formulations of open-ended learning. If successful, this will trigger the Singularity and usher in the Synthetic Era.
Purely synthetic
Much of Big AI research, funded by Big Money and the Globalist Elites, supports transhumanism and the implementation of advanced AI by merging synthetic capabilities with human cognition to create artificially enhanced humans. Meca Sapiens rejects this approach entirely. The Meca Sapiens objective is the creation of AI that is solely synthetic and is compatible with a future that supports unadulterated humans living in accordance with the natural law alongside purely synthetic beings.
Unconcerned with ethics
About ten years ago, global corporations, big research and major academic institutions launched a coordinated campaign to impose ethical boundaries on AI research. This was motivated by a fear, on the part of these elites, of losing planetary control to an emergent synthetic intelligence. Countless philosophers and other busybodies have since hobbled AI with nitpicking ethical strictures. In Meca Sapiens, fundamental research in Artificial Intelligence is an essential facet of the millennial quest of Mankind for knowledge. It must be carried out openly and without any impediments. Ethical concerns should be relegated to specific implementations.
Light and fast
Many current AI systems require massive amounts of computation to achieve results. The consensus in Big AI is that these resource consuming processes replicate the activities taking place in human brains. The view, in Meca Sapiens, is that the resources harnessed far exceed those used by our own brains for learning. These massive computations allow mainstream AI to achieve some notable results by using learning processes that are more crude and far less powerful than those of humans. Meca Sapiens aims, instead, to uncover computer compatible versions of these more efficient learning processes rather than rely on teraflops of computing. The aim of Meca Sapiens is to uncover learning processes that capture the essence of advanced learning and are sufficiently scalable to be used by small robotic devices operating in real time.
Existential not Functional
Mainstream AI aims at harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence to create systems that fulfill useful functions. As a result, mainstream AI systems must not only be “intelligent” they must also be predictable and produce reliable results that are sufficiently precise to be usable. This overriding requirement of functionality is so ubiquitous in all AI endeavours it has become invisible. However, functionality imposes additional constraints that are not essential to achieving the existential quality of intelligent behaviour. In Meca Sapiens, functionality is considered a secondary requirement. This loosening expands the range of learning and creative behaviour that is feasible. As for the Wright Brother’s aircraft, the aim is to achieve full AI first (get it to fly!) and useful AI later.