I studied both Computer Science and Psychobiology with a biological emphasis (basically neuroscience) at UC Riverside. Having this unique education gave me a great foundation to understand neuroscience and how to apply that science to computer technology. I find most times that people who are purely using computer science to create artificial intelligence lack any real undestanding of how nervous systems work. They view it from a mathematical perspective and what has been built already in the AI industry. From my unique background, I feel I do have some expertise in these areas and AI/GOFAI is nothing like how an animal nervous system operates. A generation of computer scientists have been lied too when they are told AI is mimicing biological nervous systems, it is not.

Connectomic AGI was born from work I did on the OpenWorm project. Once I was able to put the Connectomic data into a database, I created the means to use programming to emulate the C elegans nervous system.

It has been my lifelong endeavor to emulate animal nervous systems to both use to understand how nature designs nervous system and brains to work, and to apply this technology to robotics with the idea to create useful machines that can exist and operate in any given environment = general intelligence.

The most basic form on general intelligence is to allow an animal (or anibot) to move through any environment without pre-training. I call this first evolutionary scale of general intelligence "Mecha General Intelligence" since the goal of the technology is to be able to navigate easily and without the constraints of training data sets.

There are many that equate General Intelligence with human or superhuman intelligence. I do not believe this is useful. To me this is like saying we need to build formula one racing car in order to create a go cart. I do believe we can achieve human+ intelligence but we need to move up the evolutionary scale to get there.

I started with C elegans and now I am in the process of emulating the Drosophila nervous system. The Drosophila nervous system add dimensions of complexity that C elgans does not have. For example, Drosophila has the Ventral Nerve Cord (VNC) which is analogous to the mammalian spinal and peripheral nervous system. This is a huge emulation step and provides much greater insight into how nervous systems operate.

What's next? Hopefully the mouse, dog but even more lowly animals like an ant could prove extremely useful in creating general intelligent machines that could propel our abilities to explore and work for a greater good.