Human-Centered AI

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." The first glimmers of human-like intelligence appeared a few million years ago on the African continent, and continued to evolve, eventually culminating in the brain of our species Homo sapiens about 100,000 years ago. As modern humans, we can only imagine what our ancient ancestors experienced as they peered out into the night sky to contemplate the very nature of physical reality, as well as introspectively peered within themselves to ponder the very nature of their own mental reality. In the last few hundred years, our species has made immense intellectual progress in developing a precise understanding of physical reality, by discovering fundamental mathematical laws governing the behavior of space, time, matter and energy, now codified in the grand frameworks of quantum mechanics and general relativity. However, we are at the very beginnings of our quest to understand the nature of our mental reality. In particular how does human intelligence emerge from the biological wet-ware of 100 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses? The modern disciplines of neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science have made important progress over the last 100 years, laying the foundations for attacking this grand question.