In the new age of AI, the open research challenges lie in exploring unknown to far-out ambitions and ideas that aim at shrinking the significant gaps between AI and other types of intelligences – most notably, human intelligence (e.g., common sense), social intelligence (e.g., reciprocity), and natural intelligence found in living organisms (e.g., plants). Futher, with the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native 6G networks, AI embodiment will allow AI agents to transcend their purely computational nature and enable them to interact with their surrounding physical environment via sensory grounding through 6G, giving rise to autonomous goal-directed agentic AI and novel types of agent-environment interactions, e.g., human-AI interaction. Next-generation beyond 6G networks are anticipated to orchestrate the development of AGI systems in order to unleash a new “G” of mobile networks that will operate on an AGI-native telecom brain. Clearly, the use of an AGI-native telecom brain in next-generation networks opens the door for exploring insights from neuroscience to expand the creative potential of AGI network brains, especially in light of the nascent area of integrating AI and psychedelic medicine, two fields that may not have historically shared any common ground.

In this research seminar, we will elaborate on why some argue that the acronym AI might actually not stand for artificial intelligence, but active inference. Active inference is considered the key to true AI: Less artificial, more intelligent. Although active inference is still relatively young, it has a growing impact across various disciplines, e.g., human-AI interaction and HCI in general. Premised on first principles of physics, active inference reconciles and unites embodied, enactive, and cybernetic theories of brain, mind, and life in general. It is an ideal methodology for developing more advanced AGI systems by biomimicking the way living intelligent systems work, while overcoming the limitations of today’s AI and its profound lack of key elements found in living intelligent systems in terms of perception, memory, reasoning, and generating actions. Towards this end, we will first introduce the main concepts of the biomimetic active inference framework and show how to leverage it to move AI research beyond the human brain toward the emerging 6G World Brain. We will then delve into active inference’s dark-room problem, a recurrent puzzle faced by biological agents like us humans, and how to resolve it by advancing active inference via widening its scope from biological agents to psychoactive agents. We show that active inference points in the exactly opposite direction of today’s envisioned AGI-native 6G trajectory. The journey beyond 6G might not be outward via AI embodiment, but inward into what neuroscientists coined the brain’s dark energy, thereby not only resolving the dark-room problem but also helping us penetrate ever deeper into cognitive space.

Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received MSc and PhD degrees both with distinctions (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In 2003, he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2006 through 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. Further, he was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from 2014 through 2015. In 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi-enhanced mobile networks. In 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category “Contribution to a better society” of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. In 2019/2020, he held a UC3M-Banco de Santander Excellence Chair at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain. Recently, in December 2023, he was awarded with the 2023 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Tactile Internet Technical Committee for his contribution on 6G/Next G and the design of Metaverse concepts and architectures as well as the 2023 Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Computer Society Bio-Inspired Computing STC for his contribution on the symbiosis between INTERnet and Human BEING (INTERBEING). Based on Stanford University’s list of “World’s Top 2%” most cited scientists he ranks among the top 2% of all scientists worldwide and has been recently awarded 2024 Highly Ranked Scholar Lifetime status by ScholarGPS as #2 worldwide in the area of access network (top 0.05%). He is co-author of the book “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” (Wiley-IEEE Press, January 2021) and author of the sequel “6G and Onward to Next G: The Road to the Multiverse” (Wiley-IEEE Press, February 2023).