Artificial intelligence (AI) has been becoming a subject of many fields over time. Whether it will be capable of doing anything human beings can do or not is a big part of the arguments (Artificial General Intelligence -- AGI). On the other side, Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which comprehends some capabilities not only becomes more reliable in those capabilities but also expands its frame (i.e. Machine learning (ML) which is a vital tool for AI makes supervised learning possible. As a basic example, AI for self-driving cars needs huge data for better performance in determining which is a car and which is not, to keep optimum distance in traffic.

When he was a boy, Mark Solms obsessed over big existential questions. What happens when I die? What makes me who I am? He went on to study neuroscience but soon discovered that neuropsychology had no patience for such open-ended questions about the psyche. So Solms did something unheard of for a budding scientist. He reclaimed Freud as a founding father of neuroscience and launched a new field, neuropsychoanalysis. Solms had one other obstacle in his path. Born in Namibia, where his father worked for a South African diamond mining company, he grew up under apartheid in South Africa. Solms later worked at a hospital in Soweto, where a military occupation tried to clamp down on protesters. "Once you reach the end of your studies, you're required to join the very same army whose victims I was looking after," he told me.

We propose a biologically-inspired research agenda with parallel tracks aimed at AI and AI safety. The bottom-up component consists of building a sequence of biophysically realistic simulations of simple organisms such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and the zebrafish Danio rerio to serve as platforms for research into AI algorithms and system architectures. The top-down component consists of an approach to value alignment that grounds AI goal structures in neuropsychology. Our belief is that parallel pursuit of these tracks will inform the development of value-aligned AI systems that have been inspired by embodied organisms with sensorimotor integration. An important set of side benefits is that the research trajectories we describe here are grounded in long-standing intellectual traditions within existing research communities and funding structures. In addition, these research programs overlap with significant contemporary themes in the biological and psychological sciences such as data/model integration and reproducibility.