Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Based on this series of blogs on the livewired brain, which was based on David Eagleman’s Livewired , you’d be wondering whether/when our technologies would become that way. Would they become capable of changing themselves based on their “experience” of the world?   Actually, our software algorithms have already become like the brain, at least the ones we call Machine Learning. Voice recognition (Alexa), facial recognition (how your phone unlocks itself), and anything that feels like AI falls in that bucket. But the hardware doesn’t change itself. Human engineers and designers still have to make deliberate changes to the hardware.   Let’s say we do get to a point where even the hardware can re-do itself. Sure, it’d be great in many ways, for obvious reasons. Then again: “Note that a future of self-configuring devices will change what it means to fix them.” Huh? Eagleman points out that we already face that today! While “construction workers or car mechanics are rar...

It is well known, as David Eagleman says in Livewired : “We drop into the world with a brain that’s largely incomplete. As a result, we have a uniquely long period of helplessness in our infancy.” So why are we human babies born that way? “That cost pays off, because our brains invite the world to shape them.” The technical term for all this is “plasticity”. As in plastic: it can be molded into any shape, and even better, it can hold that shape.   However, as we know all too well from experience, for certain topics: “(This reshaping of the brain happens) during a rapidly closing window of time. One the window is missed, it is difficult or impossible to reopen.” The good news though is that the time-window constraint doesn’t apply for all topics. Long after baby- and toddler-hood, the brain can still reshape itself: “The shape shifting of brains is not like the glacial drifting of continental plates, but can instead be remarkably swift.”   For example, re...