The inspiration for this article is Mike the Headless Chicken. The story of Mike is one of the more bizarre episodes in history, an accident that became a rural American legend. In 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado, attempted to butcher a chicken for dinner but missed the jugular vein and left part of the brain stem intact. Amazingly, the bird survived and continued to walk, perch, and even attempt to peck for over 18 months.
The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has ignited a geopolitical competition of historic proportions. This is a massive technological arms race, with leaders like Vladimir Putin saying whoever achieves AGI first will “rule the world”. There are parallels with the nuclear arms race, which tends to get peoples attention, but is this comparison accurate? And what does it all mean for a country like Australia, a tech savvy, middle power, caught in the middle of this tussle?
For the purposes of this article, we will define AGI as at or above human level intelligence, and acknowledge that this vague description doesn’t capture the wider issues, about what intelligence is and how we measure it.
If you are using AI at the moment, then it is probably based on a model of the human neocortex. All of the current Large Language Models (LLMs) are overwhelmingly inspired by this approach. These architectures are great at abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and language generation which are all tasks that are analogous to higher-order cortical functions. But is this the path to AGI? We don’t think it is, for reasons that will be explored in this article.