Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs
1 min read
Summary
Artificial intelligence is often attributed toSci-fi novels and academic research, but pigeons deserve some of the credit.
B.F. Skinner’s middle-of-the-20th-century experiments with Associative Learning laid the groundwork for today’s advanced AI systems.
Though pigeons are not considered intelligent creatures, they proved remarkably cooperative in the lab and were used to break down the processes of learning.
A kind of machine learning whose core concept—reinforcement—is taken directly from Skinner’s school of psychology and whose main architects, the computer scientists Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto, won the Turing Award, an honor widely considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.
This article explores the interesting relationship between pigeons and AI and asks readers to rethink the evolution of natural intelligence.