Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report

TL;DR

This report summarizes the 2024 Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence, highlighting discussions on how material and biological systems encode intelligence through mechanical features, contrasting with computational approaches.

Contribution

It provides an overview of interdisciplinary discussions on Mechanical Intelligence, emphasizing structural features that enable intelligence in physical systems.

Findings

Workshop identified key structural features for MI

Discussions highlighted differences from computational intelligence

Summarized collaborative research directions

Abstract

This report provides a summary of the outcomes of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence held in 2024. Mechanical Intelligence (MI) represents the phenomenon that novel structural features of material/biological/robotic systems can encode intelligence through responsiveness, adaptivity, memory, and learning in the mechanical structure itself. This is in contrast to computational intelligence, wherein the intelligence functions occur through electrical signaling and computer code. The two-day workshop was held at NSF headquarters on May 30-31 and included 38 invited academic researcher participants, and 8 program officers from the NSF. The workshop was structured around active small and large group discussions in groups of 4-5 and 9-10 with the goal of addressing topical questions on MI. Working groups entered notes into shared presentation slides for each discussion session and presented their outcomes in a final presentation on the last day. Here we summarize the overall outcomes of the workshop.