Christoph von der Malsburg: 'Artificial intelligence attempts to do what the brain does and will take away many human activities in the future'
If we can achieve a higher and more intuitive level of learning, artificial intelligence will be the next quantum leap of digitization and will be able to help us perform a range of activities in a better, more efficient and faster manner, which will create great economic value', believes Christoph von der Malsburg, physicist and neurobiologist and one of the pioneers of AI.
Cristoph von der Malsburg, physicist and neurobiologist from Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies CC
Artificial intelligence and its development increasingly raises a number of ethical, moral, legal issues and, in the extreme, existential ones. However, artificial intelligence would not have started to develop if there were no humans and if there were no human aspects on which today's learning computer systems are based. 'Artificial intelligence depends entirely on previous human thought,' believes Von der Malsburg.
Von der Malsburg, a professor at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, began his career in neuroscience, which soon grew into the application of aspects of the human brain to computer systems, what we call artificial neural networks. Scientists today distinguish two forms of neural code: bits and neurons in the artificial neural network. His research interests have focused on organization processes in the brain with an emphasis on the structure and function of the visual system, why he is considered one of the pioneers in the development of facial recognition technology, which is increasingly used in robotic or surveillance systems. In the neurosciences he is known for his theories of network self-organization in the growing brain and for his Dynamic Link Architecture, which puts cognition on a neural basis.
He founded two successful companies based on his theories and has won many national and international awards. But to approach his broad and techno-biological knowledge of artificial intelligence von der Malsburg remains simple and practical. Here are some of his thoughts expressed in the interview for Euractiv.