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The genius who might hold the key to true AI (free energy principle)

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https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston...elligence/

EXCERPT: . . . When [Karl] Friston was inducted into the Royal Society of Fellows in 2006, the academy described his impact on studies of the brain as “revolutionary” and said that more than 90 percent of papers published in brain imaging used his methods. What’s remarkable, however, is that few of the researchers who make the pilgrimage to see Friston these days have come to talk about brain imaging at all. Over a 10-day period this summer, Friston advised an astrophysicist, several philosophers, a computer engineer working on a more personable competitor to the Amazon Echo, the head of artificial intelligence for one of the world’s largest insurance companies, a neuroscientist seeking to build better hearing aids, and a psychiatrist with a startup that applies machine learning to help treat depression. And most of them had come because they were desperate to understand something else entirely.

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 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 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....

MORE: https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston...elligence/
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