Why Experts Can't Agree on Whether AI Has a Mind Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. I'm not used to getting nasty emails from a holy man, says Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University. Levin was presenting his research to a group of engineers interested in spiritual matters in India, arguing that properties like "mind" and intelligence can be observed even in cellular systems, and that they exist on a spectrum. But when he pushed further--arguing that the same properties emerge everywhere, including in computers--the reception shifted.

A crucial building block for quantum computers based on sound has been shown to work for the first time. One popular way of building quantum computers is to encode information into quantum states of particles of light, then send them through a maze of mirrors and lenses to manipulate that information. Andrew Cleland at the University of Chicago and his colleagues set out to do the same with particles of sound. Sound is created when an object or a substance, like air, vibrates. We hear it as a continuous noise, but it is actually a collection of tiny chunks of vibration, or particles of sound, called phonons.

The new system, which runs artificial intelligence software on Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chip, is essentially an "electronic nose" that can learn the scent of a chemical from a single exposure. Researchers at Cornell University and Intel have developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that can learn the scent of a chemical with just one exposure, and then remember that scent forever. The software, which is designed to run most efficiently on an experimental chip from Intel known as Loihi, is so precise, it can even detect a scent that's masked by a number of other scents, according to researchers. Ultimately, the researchers hope to produce a market-ready solution that can detect hazardous substances in the air, sniff out dangerous drugs, discover hidden explosives, and assist with medical diagnoses. "Low-energy modules built around Loihi, running our algorithm, and hooked-up to diverse sensor arrays could be built into robots, medical analysis devices; for example, blood composition, hyperspectral processors, air quality sensors, food processing pipelines, you name it," says Thomas A. Cleland, a member of the research team and associate chair and professor of psychology at Cornell University. The system works by processing an input signal pattern for a scent drawn from an array of sensors, then recording that signal pattern in the AI software as a recognizable scent for future use.

Thomas Cleland, senior author of "Rapid Learning and Robust Recall in a Neuromorphic Olfactory Circuit" published in Nature Machine Intelligence on March 16 says, "This is a result of over a decade of studying olfactory bulb circuitry in rodents and trying to figure out essentially how it works, with an eye towards things we know animals can do that our machines can't." "We now know enough to make this work," says Leland speaking with Cornell Chronicle. "We've built this computational model based on this circuitry, guided heavily by things we know about the biological systems' connectivity and dynamics. Then we say, if this were so, this would work. And the interesting part is that it does work."

A chip can do a lot of things but still, the'brain' of the computing system falls short to when compared to an actual human brain. But now, through the science of neuromorphic computing, researchers from Intel and Cornell University have developed a chip that can smell! The chip has a nose? Researchers were able to create a mathematical algorithm that was, "based on the architecture of the mammalian olfactory bulb", as they explain in their research paper. Thomas Cleland, a professor of psychology at Cornell University was studying the biological olfactory system in mammals by measuring the electrical activity seen in their brains on smelling different odours.