Contemporary discourse on intelligence often revolves around complexity. We propose to take the opposite extreme: to explore intelligence in its minimal form. We draw inspiration from the field of synthetic biology, which studies the concept of life by engineering new organisms from scratch. Specifically, in a recent study, researchers tried to find the minimum necessary for an organism to be considered alive by synthesising a minimal form of life. Our proposal aims to explore different definitions and manifestations of minimal forms of intelligence, and to propose experimental designs and hypotheses on how these manifestations will (co)evolve on different substrates. This minimalist approach forces us to scrutinise basic assumptions and biases and opposes the capitalist forces that drive the development of AI to do more and do it better. We believe that this kind of research will lead to a reconsideration of what it means to be intelligent, which could have far-reaching social, moral and philosophical implications.

Selected contributors: Álvaro Chavero, Marion Valle, Helena Ortin, Albert López and Pablo Díaz.

Here you can find the pdf with the manifesto of the project.

You can find the rest of the project documentation in the MediaLab Matadero Arena.