A Brookhaven Lab researcher has conceptualized an “exocortex,” an extension of the human brain that will generate inspiration and imagination for scientific discovery
PTON, N.Y. — Artificial intelligence (AI) once seemed like a fantastical construct of science fiction, enabling characters to deploy spacecrafts to neighboring galaxies with a casual command. Humanoid AIs even served as companions to otherwise lonely characters. Now, in the very real 21st century, AI is becoming part of everyday life, with tools like chatbots available and useful for everyday tasks like answering questions, improving writing, and solving mathematical equations.
AI does, however, have the potential to revolutionize scientific research — in ways that can feel like science fiction but are within reach.
At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are already using AI to automate experiments and discover new materials. They’re even designing an AI scientific companion that communicates in ordinary language and helps conduct experiments. And Kevin Yager, the Electronic Nanomaterials Group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), has articulated an overarching vision for the role of AI in scientific research.
It’s called a science exocortex — “exo” meaning outside and “cortex” referencing the information processing layer of the human brain. Rather than simple chatbots and scientific assistants, the conceptualized exocortex will be an extension of a scientist’s brain. Researchers will interact with it through conversation, without the need for any invasive brain-computer interfaces.
“An exocortex, realized through software, would serve as a new source of thinking, inspiration, and imagination,” said Yager, whose vision was recently published in Digital Discovery. “If we design and build the exocortex correctly, our interactions with it will feel like those ‘aha’ moments we sometimes have upon waking from sleep or while otherwise ruminating on a problem. You won’t check in with an exocortex; you’ll experience it.”
Yager describes the exocortex as analogous to the layers of the human brain, which developed through the course of human evolution. Over millions of years, the human brain became the information processing masterpiece it is today by accumulating new layers, each one more sophisticated than the last. The bottom of the brain controls basic survival functions, like breathing. Other, more advanced layers tackle increasingly complicated functions, like emotional regulation and language processing. Most importantly, all facets of the brain work together in harmony to form “the human experience.”
“Technologically, we have the potential now to add another, external layer to the brain — one that connects us to AI,” Yager said. “And just like the specialized regions of the brain that coordinate with each other to give emergence to what we call intelligence, the exocortex will integrate individualized AI capabilities to solve a problem or generate creativity.”
An “app store” of AI agents
Compared to the average chatbot, which is a single AI system, the exocortex would be a collection of dozens of AI agents working together — customized to a researcher’s individual needs.
Each agent would be trained to carry out specific science-related tasks. A scientific literature agent, for example, could sift through published papers to find an optimal protocol for an experiment, while another AI agent collects and analyzes data from a running experiment. Additional agents could launch experiments or simulations, compare findings to previous studies, or even propose ideas for subsequent experiments.
All of the agents’ tasks will happen in concert, simultaneously, and without manual intervention, culminating in new insights delivered to the human researcher.
One design aspect of Yager’s proposed exocortex is that the AI agents will communicate with one another in plain English language. This will enable human scientists to study and audit the chains of decisions that lead to a particular AI outcome, providing much-needed opportunities to assess accuracy and exert engineering control.
Yager says the task of building an exocortex is enormous, and the developmental effort should be shared among scientists worldwide, so individual research groups can leverage their own expertise to design new agents. Ideally, scientists will one day have “an app store” from which they can download AI agents that will enhance the abilities of their own exocortex, similar to how downloading new apps adds functionality to phones. Individual AI “apps” could also be efficiently updated and replaced.
“I expect to see a multiplicative effect,” explained Yager. “As scientists simultaneously improve the individual AIs and the foundational exocortex technology, the capabilities of the exocortex will likely grow much faster than people expect.”
Of course, making the exocortex a reality won’t be easy. While scientists have designed a plethora of AIs that can interface with a user and complete specific tasks, building a network of AIs that can interact with each other is an entirely new challenge.
Yager expects each AI agent to require access to a “catalog” of the other agents and their specialized abilities, so they each can send messages describing the work they’ve done and explaining what they need from other AI agents.
“No one knows how to do this yet,” Yager said. Among the challenges is determining the ideal organization of agents. “Should it be a hierarchy where there is a chief with leaders and employees, like how a company operates? Or should it be more fluid, so the AIs figure out the workflow themselves? There is no obvious answer, and this is an exciting research question about the exocortex design that we are investigating.”
The final output of the exocortex will be a result of some sequence of decisions, planning, execution, verification, and summarization, rather than the simple text that a generative chatbot outputs. This extra iteration, promoted by the communication between AI agents and the exocortex structure, will ultimately improve the output and make the AI even more intelligent.
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