/My brother, the Robot

My brother, the Robot

Watching the progress of a human being from infancy to adulthood can be a very interesting process and with many psychological implications. Those who have a little brother were sometimes fascinated seeing him learn, witnessing his inventiveness, improving his skills and abilities to interact with the world around him. Similarly, these days, we are the spectators to the creation of a new form of intelligence created by studying the cognitive processes observed through mankind.

Psychologist Jean Piaget is the father of the theory based on human intellect which acknowledges the relationship between the mind and the external objects. This theory is known by the name of action theory. Although the classical theory stipulates the human being learns and adapts through the aid of images, for example, a baby is receptive to the image of its mother, Piaget asserts that the process responsible for the progress of personality is implemented through action. He affirms that action is the process which correlates the subject, the human, with the objective factor from the external world. Piaget further defines the process of learning as a combination of two processes: assimilation, by which he refers to the reception of the data from the external object and accommodation which represents the changes which are taking place in the brain of the subject.

Nowadays studies in Artificial Intelligence are following the same cognitive processes that constitute the base of human psychological processes. Classically, computers and automated systems were functioning based on predefined rules, which did not permit any layer of personality. Even though action was taking place, the process described by Piaget in the human brain, that of assimilation and accommodation was non-existent because the computer lacked any level of cognitive abilities. Artificial Intelligence, even in its current primitive stage of machine learning, tries to add that layer of assimilating what is happening around it then accommodating to the changing environment and to the results of its own actions, thus improving itself over time.