While researchers in artificial intelligence are getting closer to create the first artificial brain, a minority of voices in the scientific community is expressing concern that if we assume artificial intelligence will emulate one day human intelligence, we will start to consider ourselves more machine-like and this may end up undercutting our own biological intelligence.

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Miguel Nicolelis is the scientist who designed a brain-connected exoskeleton that can enable a paraplegic man to deliver last year the opening kick at the World Cup, according to BBC News. The researcher designed brain implants able to make rats see infrared light. He also connected the minds of monkeys with a technology that might be used one day to connect human brains into a mind net.

In his latest book, The Relativistic Brain: How it works and why it cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, the scientist expert in artificial intelligence states that the brain is an organism rather than a mechanism. Nicolelis explained for The WorldPost that organisms evolve according to evolutionary laws found in nature rather than being built.

The events and pressures requiring evolutionary changes in order to adapt cannot be reasonably predicted, the scientist added. Nicolelis declared that in his opinion we are facing a big danger. According to him, if we are continuing to rely more and more on computers, we will end up resembling our machines.

The Brazilian-born AI expert and neuroscientist warned that it is possible that over the long run our brains will start assimilating the way computers operate. If this is going to happen it will cause a significant reduction in the range of our natural and social behaviors normally produced, according to New York Times.

Nicolelis says that technology can change our brains because they are “plastic,” meaning environment and behavior changes the response of our neural pathways. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity by scientists.

According to Nicolelis, if we want to preserve our culture and our way of living, he says, we need to keep track of how technology may be harming aptitudes of the brain. Today the emergent field of artificial intelligence has become very trendy and there are many projects underway.

According to Discovery News researches in the field focus their efforts to emulate the brain by using silicon circuits, algorithms and even living tissue. Nicolelis is skeptic about the Human Brain Project of Henry Markram, which was funded with a billion euro by the European Union and established in 2013.

He is not the only critic. Numerous other neuroscientists call unrealistic the project’s ambition to model the brain in a supercomputer. Meanwhile, both Facebook and Google are working on their own projects to build artificial brains in computers, based on networks of artificial neurons. Both high-tech companies use "deep learning" artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain, as do other top tech companies, including Baidu, Microsoft and Twitter.

TagsAI, artificial brain, interface brain-machine, Deep Learning