"I work on developing an understanding of biological complexity and how we can create it, because the limits of software engineering have been clear now for two decades. The biggest programs anyone can build are about ten million lines of code. A real biological object — a creature, an ecosystem, a brain — is something with the same complexity as ten billion lines of code. And how do we get there?"

The New York Times, in a front page article on August 31st ("Scientists Report They Have Made Robot That Makes Its Own Robots" By Kenneth Chang) reported on the work of Jordan Pollack and his Brandeis University colleague Hod Lipson: "For the first time", The Times reported, "computer scientists have created a robot that designs and builds other robots, almost entirely without human help."

"I work on this question of self-organization, using evolution, neural networks, games, problem solving, and robotics," says Pollack. "And the way that we work on it is by trying to set up non-equilibrium chemical reactions in software which dissipate computer time ­ a form of energy — and create structure. Some of that structure we can actually make real in the form of robots, and although robots are much more exciting to cameras and the media than problem-solvers, games and language learning, our fundamental work is in trying to understand where complexity itself comes from, without a designer."

He sees "a merger of bio-informatics, biotechnology, and information processing. As we understand cellular processes, neural representations, and develop microelectronic and nanoscale technologies, our artifacts will be able to interact with our biological forms at a most fundamental level. Unfortunately, we really haven't fathomed the complexity of nature yet to know what to do with it."

— JB

JORDAN POLLACK, is a computer science and complex systems professor at Brandeis University. His laboratory's work on AI, Artificial Life, Neural Networks, Evolution, Dynamical Systems, Games, Robotics, Machine Learning, and Educational Technology has been reported on by the New York Times, Time, Science, NPR, Slashdot.org and many other media sources worldwide. Jordan is a prolific inventor, advises several startup companies and incubators, and in his spare time runs Thin Mail, an Internet based service designed to increase the usefulness of wireless email.

Click here for Jordan Pollack's Edge Bio Page

I wanted to use the opportunity of my Digerati Dinner on February 22, 2001 to ask the guests, a group that included many of the movers and shakers of the digital revolution, to comment on the state of the Digital revolution. At every place setting as a brief questionnaire, leading off, in bold type, with the following:

"What's Next?"

As I should have suspected, people were too excited by being in each other's presence to respond. But just as I was about to give up hope, Israeii investor Joseph "Yossi" approached.

"Mr. Brockman," he said in a thick accent. "Being an Israeli, I must respond to your question not with an answer but with two more questions, which I would like to adress to your faithful readers. First: Where are we right now on the enclosed chart (see "The Economics of Dreams" below). Second: How long will it be until the stock market begins to go up?"

I had met Yossi during the "Cool People in the Hot Desert" trip sponsored by our mutual friend, the Bavarian media mogul Hubert Burda. At the time of my visit, a year had passed since he had sold the extremely popular Internet communication program ICQ to AOL for a reported $400 million. When the deal had been announced, the Israeli press and technology sector were incredulous that the 19-month old company run by Yossi with its founders, three college-aged men including his son, with a tiny revenue stream and no profits, could be worth $400 million. The news created a stampede, the result of which is that greater Tel Aviv now rivals Munich in technology startups after Silicon Valley and New York City. When I landed in Tel Aviv, a year had passed since the deal and the press perception was different: "What kind of schmuck sells out early for $400 million when the company could easily be sold today for $4 billion!!

When he was about 14, Patrick Bateson went to a bird observatory where enthusiasts assembled to look at migrating birds. "I met a man who asked me what I was going to do at university. I said 'I'm going to be a biologist'. He then asked me what I was going to do after that. I wasn't quite sure and he asked me whether I had thought of doing a PhD. I didn't know what PhD meant. So he explained and it sounded like heaven. I could go on playing at things I loved doing after I got my first degree."

At Cambridge Bateson read Zoology and met Robert Hinde, who was a lecturer in the Zoology Department at that time. "I thought he was one of the cleverest men I had ever encountered and I wanted to do research under him", he says. In due course, he stayed on to work on behavioral imprinting in birds which then got him interested in the development of behavior. That was how he was drawn into lab-based work rather than the field ornithology which he had originally looked forward to doing.

After getting his PhD at Cambridge in 1963, he went to Stanford for a couple of years. "I went there to work with a fascinating man called Karl Pribram who had started out as a neuro-surgeon and then became one of the most imaginative neuro-psychologists of his time." When he returned to Cambridge, he was interested in tying together the ideas that he'd got from Pribram with his continuing interests in the development of behavior. By this time he was a research fellow of King's College. "At dinner one night in Kings, I happened to be sitting next to Gabriel Horn. He was a neuro-physiologist working on the neural mechanisms of attention and habituation. He was getting increasingly interested in more complicated learning processes. We discovered that we had similar interests, but approached the matter from very different angles. We liked the way each other thought and started experimental work together. The collaboration and friendship has continued to this day."

A couple of years later Bateson and Horn started to collaborate with Steven Rose, who was one of the first biochemists to become seriously interested in learning and memory. The three of them worked together until the mid-'70s, "but once again," Bateson notes, "the collaboration developed into life-long friendship."

What has always obsessed British biologist Steven Rose is the relationship between mind and brain. His approach to understanding this relationship has been to look for ways in which we can locate changes in behavior, thought, or action, which can be mapped in some way onto changes in physiology and biochemistry, and changes in structure in the brain, that is in processes that you can study biologically. For most of his life the search has been focused on how we should understand learning and memory.

Rose points out that the reason for this is obvious. He is an experimental scientist. "I work with animals," he says, "and when an experimental animal learns, it changes its behavior. And it's always easier to measure change than stasis in science. You can then ask what changes happen in the brain when an animal learns a particular task, and you can study those changes in ways that we can manipulate in the laboratory. When I started doing this, back in the late 60s, early 70s, this was a deeply unfashionable field. People thought these were questions beyond the edge of science, you couldn't actually touch them. Now it's the hottest area in neuroscience."

Steve and I got together in New York after he attended the memory meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, which is the home of molecular biology and molecular genetics. "Jim Watson decided a few years ago that the focus of neuroscience should be learning and memory," he said, "and he started setting up molecular techniques and genetic techniques there, with some very bright guys working on it. They have a conference every two years, and we have a matching conference in Britain and across the rest of Europe. And these are the questions which now we're beginning to approach for molecular answers."

At Cold Spring Harbor, Rose was talking about his discovery of a new molecule "which seems to be able to rescue the memory loss that you get with the disorder of the Alzheimer proteins. What started as a sheer intellectual excitement also looks like it's going to have rather significant human payoff, and that's good news."

Geoffrey Miller is known for his research which focuses on evolutionary psychology and sexual selection. In this regard, his work is in the tradition of scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Steven Pinker. In support of his views on sexual selection, his published academic papers, conference talks, and colloquia, range across the areas of visual perception, cognition, learning, robotics, neural networks, genetic algorithms, human mate choice, evolutionary game theory, and the origins of language, music, culture, intelligence, ideology, and consciousness.

Miller believes that our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines."Evolution is driven not just by natural selection for survival, but by an equally important process that Darwin called sexual selection through mate choice.," he has noted. He proposes that the human mind's most impressive, baffling abilities are courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centered view of evolution to a courtship-centered view, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind.

—JB