What the eye does not see

1Question

A frog lives by catching insects that move. But if the insects do not move, the frog will starve to death, even when it is surrounded by them.

The food is right in front of its eyes. Why doesn't the frog know?

2Structure

In 1959, a group of scientists looked at what passes between a frog's eye and its brain. The frog's eye did not send what it saw to the brain whole, like a picture. It chose, and told. Something small is moving. Something is passing by. It is getting dark.

It did not tell the brain about things that stay still. So the frog's brain does not know about an insect that is not moving.

An eye is not a camera. An eye does three things.

• It receives. It takes in light. A camera does this too.
• It chooses. It picks out what matters from what it took in.
• It tells. It tells the brain in a way the brain can understand.

The brain knows only what the eye has told it. What the eye does not see, the brain does not know.

3Experiment

AI is the same. To work on a computer screen, it has to see the screen. Most often, the screen is handed to the AI as a picture.

We built an eye that holds this thought, and gave it to an AI. Instead of handing over the whole picture, this eye chooses what is where on the screen, and tells it. We left the AI's brain as it was and changed only the eye.

This is what changed. Over the same 90 runs, clicks in the wrong place fell from 107 to 22.

4Understanding

Life has been growing its eyes for more than 500 million years. The brain grew inside the world that the eye widened for it. AI was different. Its brain grew faster than its eyes.

So before we ask how smart an AI is, we ask what it is looking at. However smart it is, it does not know what it has not seen.

A good eye is not the one that takes in the most. It is the one that chooses what the brain needs to know, and tells it. And it is the one that says so when it has not seen something.

What should the eye of an AI that works beside a person tell?