When a comic is described as “a 40-page exploration of thinking and perceiving, a love letter to the brain (and hate mail to AI) that champions the beauty of thinking for yourself and how it is the most powerful thing you can do in the face of so-called AI” it pretty much guarantees itself a review spot at Broken Frontier. Alexandra Gallant-Lee’s Brains is a damning indictment of technology that, as we are all aware, steals human creativity without permission, attribution or compensation, devastates the environment, and is fundamentally and oppressively anti-worker in design and intent.
Gallant-Lee’s approach to Brains comes from her own reflections on how we are being sold the concept of AI as advantageous on the bizarre premise that doing less, thinking less, and knowing less is somehow something desirable. Through the on-page avatar of Frogby, a blood cell with a crush on the brain, Gallant-Lee explores ideas like the joy and humanity pf creativity and the very human thought processes that fuel it. Something that can obviously never be replicated by theft-tech like generative AI.
Brains is, as the title obviously implies, a celebration of human thinking over the plausibility generators/plagiarism machines that are being falsely forced on us an “inevitability.” It’s a deep, immersive trip into everything it is to be human. Into everything that makes our creative achievements aesthetically beautiful rather than soullessly regurgitated. It’s a testament to true consciousness over the superficial void of artificial “intelligence” and an eloquent and elegant visual essay on why we should be rejecting that existential threat on every level.
Using expressive visual metaphor and dreamy uses of applied colour Gallant-Lee takes us into a world of the mind that is connective, accessible and carefully considered. Brains is a concise and unarguable rebuttal to anyone inexplicably arguing in favour of this malevolent technology and a reminder of the joy it is to be truly human.
Alexandra Gallant-Lee (W/A) • Self-published, $6.00/$15.00
Buy online here from Radiator Comics (print)
Review by Andy Oliver
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow