Synthetic Intelligence
An alternative approach with a direct roadmap to Artificial General Intelligence
The term was first coined by philosopher John Haugeland in 1986. He illustrated it by comparing imitation diamonds to synthetic diamonds. The former mimic the appearance of natural diamonds but do not have their desirable properties.
Synthetic diamonds are real diamonds, composed of the same carbon crystal lattice, but created by engineered rather than natural processes.
Without making any attempt to mimic natural intelligence, New Sapience has engineered a technology that synthesizes the result of those processes, knowledge, in machines.
Carl Sagan famously said, “if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” This is why Synthetic Intelligence is so much more powerful than the traditional approach to AI which essentially attempts to build a mechanized thinking animal from scratch in order to reach knowledge in machines.
The apple pie here is knowledge, models of the world.
Our work at New Sapience has focused on “the pie.” We asked ourselves if computers already had the necessary functionality for knowledge without having to resort to organic brain recipes.
Computers do. They already have multiple information processing layers that assemble successively more complex information structures from those that arise from the layers below. At the lowest level there is binary code execution, on top of that we have compiled code and then multiple levels of interpretated code as needed. Logic, analysis, abstraction, and synthesis; all the necessary information processing routines are already available.
As it turns out, computers have advantages over organic brains for processing knowledge. They have perfect memory, repeatability, extendibility, and connectivity. All that has been lacking is to identify the core indigents and a find the recipe to create that ultimate information structure that is knowledge. For this we drew upon epistemology and otology, rather than neuroscience (at least to the extent that neuroscience is about neurons rather than about what they produce).
The Periodic Table transformed Alchemy into the science of Chemistry. Equally profound, our identification and classification of the building blocks of cognition and their integration into what we call the cognitive core, is transforming the philosophies of Epistemology and Otology into a science of knowledge.
Today we have the solid foundation needed to engineer synthetic intelligences. We call them sapiens. Successful models of the world stand because they are architecturally sound. Our cognitive core is equivalent to the discovery of the arch. Once people discovered they could stack stones in such a way to as to cross a stream, they had a direct roadmap to bridges, aqueducts, and the Pantheon.
Computers have been “smart” all along, but they were ignorant. Now, New Sapience has a clear and unlimited roadmap to synthesize human knowledge for sapiens’ minds. We are giving computers something to think about. The long-awaited day of thinking machines is at hand.
