A Critique of Pure Learning: What Neural Networks Can Learn from Animal Brains

Found the bit about planes/birds vs humans/AI very insightful:

"But it remains controversial whether further progress in AI will benefit from the study of animal brains. Perhaps we have learned all that we need to from animal brains. Just as airplanes are very different from birds, so one could imagine that an intelligent machine would operate by very different principles from those of a biological organism. We argue that this is unlikely because what we demand from an intelligent machine—what is sometimes misleadingly called “artificial general intelligence”—is not general at all; it is highly constrained to match human capacities so tightly that only a machine structured similarly to a brain can achieve it. An airplane is by some measures vastly superior to a bird: It can fly much faster, at greater altitude, for longer distances, with vastly greater capacity for cargo. But a plane cannot dive into the water to catch a fish, or swoop silently from a tree to catch a mouse. In the same way, modern computers have already by some measures vastly exceeded human computational abilities (e.g. chess), but cannot match humans on the decidedly specialized set of tasks defined as general intelligence."

but genome (raw DNA sequence) is only small part of much more complex and dynamic system, which includes regulatory networks, metabolic pathways, RNA interference, cell signalling networks and whatnot [0], surely the number of bits that can be encoded by this is much higher than GB, probably by many orders of magnitude. Genome is just a blueprint of machinery that creates another machinery.

This is not to take away from authors point (and complex systems can be created with simple rules and just a few bits) but innate structure itself can be very complex, I'm wondering if there are any neurophysiological studies showing evidence of a built-in universal grammar, Chomsky's old idea [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar