PERSON
Stanislas Dehaene
The French cognitive neuroscientist who has spent his career doing what the AI industry declines to do—measuring the mind it claims to replicate—producing in his four great bodies of work the most rigorous specification document for human intelligence that exists.
To read Stanislas Dehaene against the backdrop of artificial intelligence is to encounter a scientist who treats the questions the industry leaves philosophical as questions for experiment. Where others assert that machines understand, or assert that they do not, Dehaene reaches for the apparatus: the brain scanner, the masked stimulus, the electrophysiology electrode, the carefully designed behavioral test. Born in Roubaix in 1965 and trained first as a mathematician before turning to experimental psychology, he is one of the rare people equally fluent in the formalism of a learning algorithm and in the wet biology of living cortex, which is why his confrontation with AI is more productive than most. His career has produced four great bodies of work that together constitute something close to a complete answer to the question of what intelligence is and where it lives: the
global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness, the theory of
neuronal recycling explaining how the brain learns