The ant and The Matrix – rethinking intelligence
SOME TIME ago, I was watching an ant erratically moving around on the beach, wondering what it was doing. It reminded me of the ant parable of Herbert Simon, the US political scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics.
According to Simon in his book The Sciences of the Artificial, an ant moves laboriously across a wind-shaped beach to his goal. While moving ahead, he constantly changes direction to climb a dune, circumnavigate a pebble, or exchange information with a fellow ant. It is obvious that he does not follow a straight line or the shortest route to his destination. The reason is that although the ant has an underlying sense of direction, his movements are irregular because he cannot foresee all the obstacles and must continually adapt his course. His horizon is very close, and he deals with each obstacle individually without giving much thought to future obstacles. To understand the ant’s behaviour, we need to understand the contribution of the beach, or the context of the ant.
Similarly, the complexity of human behaviour over time is mostly a reflection of the complexity of our environment. In the case of a human being, a problem-solving environment is often described as an extensive maze of possibilities that is selectively searched and reduced to manageable proportions. The problem is, however, that human beings have a limited capacity to store chunks of information in short-term memory (often referred to as “cognitive strain”) and, therefore, find it difficult to execute an efficient strategy unless the stimuli are greatly slowed down or they can use external memory aids.
Although humans have virtually unlimited long-term memory for the storage of a variety of information, it takes time to transfer items from the limited short-term memory to the large-scale long-term memory. Due to the memory limitations of human beings, it can be hypothesised that human goal-directed behaviour mostly reflects the environment in which it takes place, as in the case of the ant.
Based on Simon’s thinking, Rodney Brooks, a roboticist and emeritus professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contended many years later in his famous “Intelligence without representation” lecture that animals are not so smart because they do complicated mathematics in their heads, but because they rely on the world as its own representation.
The arguments of Simon and Brooks agree with those of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst, who stated that man is not rational, but driven by instincts and desires, just like any other animal. These limiting traits of human beings are the reason people are becoming increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, machine learning and search engines to solve problems.
But AI and web search engines have fundamental limitations. Despite tremendous progress, computers have difficulty in answering “what if?” questions and applying imagination or common-sense reasoning.
These limitations are partly the reason a UK start-up called Improbable is following a fundamentally new approach and is attempting to build The Matrix, a next generation virtual reality (VR) world similar to the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix. The VR is not created in some abstract sense, but genuine, living and breathing recreations of the real world that allow people to have totally new experiences. Improbable, for instance, built a virtual replica of the city of Cambridge, with 130 000 virtual inhabitants. It included simulations of the traffic and public transport networks, utilities, power lines, mobile phone and internet systems.
Improbable’s ultimate goal is to create totally immersive, persistent virtual worlds and in doing so change how we make decisions.
Now let us get back to the ant and its complex environment, the beach. The Matrix is an ultra-high definition simulation of the real and complex world that entails the modelling of the interaction with hundreds of thousands of people, cars, buildings, animals, objects, the weather and many more. The Matrix makes a different approach to AI possible, where intelligence materialises from the synergistic interaction of simple entities embedded in complex environments. This will allow us to ask “what if” questions of The Matrix, as well as questions that require imagination and common-sense reasoning. The Matrix will simulate the questions and provide possible solutions to complex problems. According to this view, intelligence is not considered as an ability inherent to a living creature, but as a composite of the interaction of the creature with its complex environment.
Perhaps The Matrix would have helped us to make totally different decisions in the Covid-19 crisis and society’s response to it – decisions that are more rational, not driven by our fears, instincts, desires or immediate short-term goals, but decisions that lead to actions that maximise our expected utility.