The most crucial question humanity can ask is - How do we understand, design, and test the important points and sub-spaces in the larger space of biological and artificial intelligence? We have to develop tools and techniques to probe the brains of model organisms (ideally, mammalian brains like mice, rats, monkeys etc.) during naturalistic behavior, and simultaneously work on designing such interfaces for the human brain. In addition, we have to develop artificially intelligent system architectures, inspired by the models designed to understand mammalian brains. This will comprise an ecosystem where insights from both the biological and artificial intelligence systems positively feed each other and help in their accelerated growth.

We should be able to simultaneously record and manipulate a large population of neurons during the animal’s behavior. Recording the action potentials and coarser local-field potentials using electrodes and voltage-indicator based optical imaging seem to be the most promising avenues. We need a sufficiently accurate mapping between the neuronal-activity space and the behavior space. This requirement in turn dictates the spatial and temporal resolutions of the tools. In order to accelerate and reach towards the goal of understanding human intelligence, we have to work on understanding the intelligence of model organisms as well as designing interfaces for human brains, in parallel.