Can Synthetic Biology Inspire The Next Wave Of AI?

Here's what AI can learn from biology. In building the world's first airplane at the dawn of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers took inspiration from the "insightful" movements of birds. They observed and reverse-engineered aspects of the wing in nature, which in turn helped them make important discoveries about aerodynamics and propulsion. Similarly, to build machines that think, why not seek inspiration from the three pounds of matter that operates between our ears? Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and winner of the Turing Award, seemed to agree: "I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain."