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True Artificial Intelligence would bypass problems of biological complexity and ethics, growing up on a substrate ideal for initiating Recursive Self-Improvement. (fully reprogrammable, ultrafast, the AI's "natural habitat".) This Artificial Intelligence would be based upon: 1) our current understanding of the central algorithms of intelligence, 2) our current knowledge of the brain, obtained through high-resolution fMRI and delicate Cognitive Science experiments, and 3) the kind of computing hardware available to AI designers.

Humans cannot conduct any of these enhancements to ourselves; the inherent structure of our biology and the limited level of our current technology makes this impossible.

Recursive Self-Improvement is the ability of a mind to genuinely improve its own intelligence. This might be accomplished through a variety of means; speeding up one's own hardware, redesigning one's own cognitive architecture for optimal intelligence, adding new components into one's own hardware, custom-designing specialized modules for recurrent tasks, and so on.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston’s group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter.

Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses.

A crucial element of the approach is that the probabilities are based on experience, but they change when relevant new information, such as visual information about the object’s location, becomes available. “The brain is an inferential agent, optimising its models of what’s going on at this moment and in the future,” says Friston. In other words, the brain runs on Bayesian probability.