- US Department of Energy scientists explore the concept of “Exocortex”
- It is presented as an extension of the scientist’s brain with word-based HCI.
- It’s uncharted territory, as one team member puts it.
AI is already a big part of our lives, shaping healthcare, transportation, education, customer service, retail, and the creative industries, to name just a few.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are currently exploring the concept of a scientific “exocortex,” the integration of artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities, seen as an extension of the scientist’s brain.
The idea is to increase the cognitive capabilities of researchers by providing a bridge between the human mind and a network of AI agents.
Kevin Yager, leader of the Electronic Nanomaterials Group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), detailed the idea in Digital discovery. The proposed exocortex is certainly ambitious in its scope, as it aims to streamline specific research tasks through a swarm of intercommunicating agents.
Each AI agent would specialize in particular tasks—whether handling scientific literature, orchestrating experiments, or synthesizing data—and their collective behavior could offer a synergy that significantly expands the cognitive reach of human scientists.
The exocortex could also aid scientific inspiration and imagination by leaning toward hallucinations.
As Yager explains, “Although hallucinations are generally undesirable, their existence is intrinsic and there is a balance between hallucinations and creativity. In other words, a certain amount of hallucinations is desirable to enhance creativity and communication. More generally, LLM assessments of creativity suggest that they can generate results that are not trivially novel and useful to humans.”
This vision is not without challenges, naturally, and will require further advances in AI, particularly in terms of reliability and efficiency in highly technical domains.
Yager says, “Research is required to determine how best to exploit LLMs to generate agent modules that can autonomously perform tasks (on short time scales) by iterating on a problem.”
The development of a word-based human-computer interface (HCI) will also be necessary to make these interactions feel like natural extensions of the human thought process.
Although still in a speculative stage, the exocortex concept seems like a natural evolution of AI.
As Yager says, “the interaction between a swarm of AI agents (each responsible for intelligently mediating access to a set of research capabilities) and a human researcher should lead to the emergence of enhanced human capabilities. By expanding the researcher’s intelligence to the exocortex, the researcher can achieve more, as they can intuitively and fluidly weave a myriad of physical, computational, and cognitive systems into their intellectual work.”
In an article about Technological explorationWritten by some of his colleagues, Yager calls for arms, stating: “We are entering uncharted territory with enormous potential benefits for nanoscience and beyond. But no one person can do it alone. We need a community.”
