more intelligent than his teachers (of course “one could not send the machine to school without
the other children making excessive fun of it” (Turing, 1950)). This would be learning of
knowledge.
We could also attempt that machines might reach the capability of learning by
themselves, in a similar way as we did. This is, by evolution of knowledge. Machines might
evolve themselves into beings more intelligent and more conscious than men, improving from
generation to generation (always depending in what we understand for intelligence and
consciousness). Evolution, natural or artificial, is a slow (but sure) process, because it requires
of experimentation of how suited are individuals in their environment, and how they might
change, in order to improve without losing their useful capabilities. In any case, artificial
evolution would be not as slow as natural evolution, because it can learn from its mistakes (in
natural evolution the information of dead animals (some of which might have been mistakes)
is lost), and it can be directed (natural evolution seems to have no goal). But nevertheless, this
would take a lot of time7.
Should we panic? Not yet. The information contained in one cell cannot be contained
in a normal computer. Other issue is that we should not throw away millions of years of
evolution, and start from zero. Genetic engineering and genetic computing might allow that we
will produce “machines” “better” than humans, basing ourselves in humans.
Will machines make us prescindable, and will they do with us what we did with god?8
Perhaps, but, as Nietzsche stated, our goal is to create superior beings than us. He meant about
our children, but our machines are also our creation. In other words, it is our nature to create
superior beings. If this also includes our extinction, it does not matter. We are finite anyway.
1.2. What is a Behaviour-Based System?
As we said in Section 1.1, behaviour-based systems (BBS) are inspired in the field of
ethology, which is the part of biology which studies animal behaviour (Manning, 1979;
Tinbergen, 1951; Lorenz, 1981; McFarland, 1981). This is because many properties desirable
in autonomous intelligent systems are present in animal behaviour: autonomy (self-control),
adaptation to changes in the environment, learning, situatedness, goal-directedness, and
persistence, among others.
We can say that the goal of a BBS, is to offer the control (cybernetics (Wiener, 1948))
of an autonomous agent. The term agent9 has been used in a wide variety of contexts. For us,
7This issue came from discussing with Marvin Minsky and Push Singh.
8This issue was introduced by Fernando Contreras.
9In English, people used thepronoun “it” for animals when they considered that they had no intelligence.
Since the paradigm of behaviour-based systems consists precisely in assuming that anim als are intelligent and in
building intelligent systems inspired in animal intelligence, researchers often call animals, agents, robots, and
animats with the pronouns “he” or “she”. We will refer to agents and animats as “he”, because we consider that,
although they exhibit intelligence, it is low enough to be considered as masculine.
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