Researchers have found that a material can mimic the sea slug’s most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms.
“Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism’s survival,” says Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. “We want to take advantage of that mature intelligence in animals to accelerate the development of AI.”