My academic background is centered in International Relations, cyber defense and cybersecurity, and tech-based businesses. Those who know me understand that I am a relentless geek or nerd who has been involved in various technological, political, and social projects, and I enjoy learning a little about everything beyond my professional area, from programming to the functioning of the human body.
During one of my quests to expand my knowledge, I delved into the fascinating realm of cognitive neuroscience. Exploring the functioning of the human brain and how this intricate web of interconnected neurons generates what we know as the mind completely transformed my perspective.
Just as our brain operates like a vast neural network, with connections of varying distances and cells interacting at different levels, with electrical signals flowing through them and giving rise to our consciousness and learning process, we are currently beginning to emulate this structure and incorporate it into how computers function. Moreover, today machines benefit from Big Data, that enormous amount of data created collectively every day by all of us with practically every action we take, such as every photo we take, the times we lock and unlock our phones, every web page we open, every Like we give, every ad, image, or news we ignore, and even the color of a garment we buy online or the brand of cookies we choose at the supermarket ends up contributing to that ocean of data that then becomes information. According to Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University, the information we handle today is so vast that it is impossible to clearly comprehend. Currently, as Diamandis explains in his book “Abundance”, the weekly edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average amount accessed by a person in the 17th century over their entire lifetime. To illustrate it further, from the beginning of human history until 2003, five exabytes of information had been generated. What is an exabyte? One billion gigabytes, that is, a one with eighteen zeros to its right. Then, by 2010, according to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, humanity was already generating up to 5 exabytes every two days, and recent estimates[16] suggest that by 2025, global society will produce 463 exabytes of information per day. If we sometimes feel lost among so much information, now we understand why.
To better understand how we can teach computers today, let’s first understand how we ourselves learned something as simple as identifying a fork. Our parents showed us and pointed to a fork and said “fork” many times until we repeated it. Once we learned that, we thought we knew everything and pointed to a spoon and again said “fork”, at which point our parents told us “no, spoon”. Once the difference between the two was understood, every time we see a fork, the label “fork” appears in our mind, activating certain neural pathways and not others. This learning happens through constant reinforcement of perceived information, so our understanding of life is based on large data filtered through our brains that act as a computer processing the received data.
[16] Desjardins, J. (2019). How much data is generated each day? World Economic Forum. Accessed on June 15, 2021, at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/how-much-data-is-generated-each-day-cf4bddf29f.