The brian is often approached as a control system; as an implemented, crucial strategy to cope with a changing environment through adaptation of behavior. Reversely, for the field of control systems, engineering the brain is an important inspiration of how systems can be developed to deal with dynamic complexity. Ricardo Sanz (Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain) argues that the required level of complexity for current systems in society has become too high to be controllable by humans: system behavior has become too complex to be analytically solvable, and failures cannot be understood anymore by humans. With Paul Verschure he discusses a strategy to develop and build complex systems that control themselves, and can learn to do so, on inspired and based by some capabilities of the brain like self-awareness, an idea that goes back to classic Cybernetics. In his view, the brain is but one particular example implementation of a system that can cope with changing environmental demands, and that can learn itself how problems in the world could be solved. Control systems are classically not engineered to control themselves, or to be able to adjust to wrong estimates of the controller, instead of wrong estimates of the world (or 'plant'): there is always some human involved for control. But the human brain is not a perfect example, according to Sanz, it is a 'good enough' solution that evolved given the environments of humans; so to copy, or merely mimic the brain is in his view at best insufficient. He theorizes a much higher level of control systems, only partially bio-inspired, that might eventually incorporate elements of self-awareness, but moreover is capable to control processes too complex for current machines, and humans.

About the lecturerRicardo Sanz is professor in systems engineering and automatic control and researcher in the field of autonomous systems at the UPM Autonomous Systems Laboratory.