AI Spontaneously Re-Creates Brain Activity Pattern Used in Navigation

I usually view all the "AI is going to take over the world" talk with a large amount of skepticism. This article however unnerved me a little. If the AI's are starting to mimic how we think when solving tasks, without any knowledge of how we think, then that seems significant.

Here is the article

...The program surprised the scientists by spontaneously generating hexagonal-shaped patterns of activity akin to those generated by navigational cells in the mammalian brain called grid cells. Grid cells have been shown in experiments with real rats to be fundamental to how an animal tracks its own position in space.

What’s more, the simulated rat was able to use the grid-cell-like coding to navigate a virtual maze so well that it even learnt to take shortcuts.

“This paper came out of the blue, like a shot, and it’s very exciting,” says neuroscientist Edvard Moser at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway. Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his co-discovery of grid cells and the brain’s other navigation-related neurons, including place cells and head-direction cells, which are found in and around the hippocampus region.

“It is striking that the computer model, coming from a totally different perspective, ended up with the grid pattern we know from biology,” says Moser. The work is a welcome confirmation that the mammalian brain has developed an optimal way of arranging at least this type of spatial code, he adds.

“It will be extremely interesting to analyze the inner workings of the deep-learning system and see whether the authors have discovered a universal computational principle that aids spatial navigation,” says computational neuroscientist Andreas Herz at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.