Three months before ChatGPT changed everything, I sat down for two hours with a neuroscientist and a complex systems theorist to ask a question most of the #AI industry still isn’t asking:
What if we’re building intelligence the wrong way?
Danko Nikolic ran a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. He went into neuroscience because he was frustrated with the limits of artificial neural networks. John Smart co-founded the Evo-Devo Universe research community and has spent decades studying how complex adaptive systems actually grow.
One argues we need to copy the brain more deeply. The other argues we need to copy life itself. Neither thinks bigger models alone get us there.
In 2022 that sounded contrarian. In 2026, with trillion-dollar bets riding on scale and #AIAlignment still unsolved, it’s a question worth asking again: is bigger enough, or are we missing something only biology can teach?
We get into practopoiesis and where intelligence comes from, the power-law problem with piling on parameters, whether we need hardware that breaks from von Neumann, and why both of them think emotion and #consciousness can’t be bolted on later.
Danko left me with a line I still haven’t shaken:
Consciousness is the price to pay for intelligence.
If he’s right, what exactly are we paying for?
Watch or listen to my full 2-hour conversation with Danko Nikolic and John Smart on #neuroscience, biomimicry, and the future of AI:
Danko Nikolic and John Smart discuss the future of AI, Neuromimicry, Biomimicry, and the AI Alignment Problem.