First you need a container for all the gel. It shouldn’t get runny at high temperatures either, and it has to be optically clear and electrically unconducive.
What you do is you create artificial neurons and stir them into the gel, more or less.
The neurons are a sandwich of three parts; the top being a solar (photo-voltaic) wafer, the middle a silicon memory wafer, the bottom a wireless frequency emitter/receiver. (They might need a clear case to trap air for near neutral buoyancy in the gel.) With current technology (looking at the size of 200 GB micro SD cards, and researching the smallest commercial photo-voltaic cells) I imagine these things could be made the size of coarse sand, a few cubic millimeters.
LED’s coat the inside of the skull, powering all neurons without the need for billions of wires. Neurons communicate wirelessly with very low power signals.
To reduce the risk of overheating the gel should be thermally conductive. The neuron substitutes should be coated with something reflective to spread the light and prevent absorption (except the solar cells). Thirdly, the skull should be a double walled type thing with thermocouples and water cooling.
If a few billion of these artificial neurons are made, given identical programming which can change/activate on its own according to stimulus, and given human sensory inputs, well… hopefully they’ll organize themselves like biological neurons do. If we can get this to happen, the result could be something similar to biological intelligence.
Plus, if the designer does their job there will be cool glowy eyes. Just saying.
Comparing this to modern AI ventures in a metaphor; I think its simpler to make the right seed, and then feed it. It seems better than trying to make an adult tree from scratch. I mean, you probably could, and then get very repeatable trees. But there might be an easier way.
A fully formed brain might be fiendishly complex but it’s beginnings are much less so. The beginning of a human is the combination of two cells, each with 80 or so gigabytes of genetic information. Most of that is superfluous hiccup reflexes from our fish ancestors and such, or so I have gathered. After that life and intelligence develop by interacting with the environment.
Also, the body is important. It allows and more importantly, motivates the mind to do things. A body provides needs, things to get and get away from. If a baby didn’t have thirst, hunger, fear, and curiosity warring for control, then that baby wouldn’t understand the point of doing anything. Broad self driven-ness and initiative is what separates a mind and computer.
Maybe doing enough to meet the complex requirements needed to operate our bodies (and keep them comfortable) naturally gives rise to intelligence. Make one, watch its counterpart form.
So yeah, instead of putting knowledge into a structure, make a structure capable of acquiring knowledge.
In summary, all we need to do is replicate the starting state of a neuron, make lots of copies, provide inputs, and let nature do it’s thing.
