The beauty of the human mind is that, since the dawn of time, we’ve wondered what exactly goes on inside it. What makes us think? How do we remember things? What gives us the ability to reason, imagine, dream, and understand the world around us? These are questions that have fascinated humanity for centuries, and they’re questions that have fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been enthralled by the idea of artificial intelligence. Not the kind of AI we see plastered across the internet today, but something more along the lines of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I used to watch that show every week with my parents while growing up in Ontario, and the character of Data always fascinated me.

Just imagine creating something completely artificial, something capable of thinking, learning, and understanding the world around it. Give it a body, the ability to move freely, interact with objects, hold conversations with people, and hell, maybe even figure out how to get along with a cat. The possibilities seemed endless to me as a child, and quite frankly, they still do.

But when I look at the world today, I can’t help feeling that we’ve lost sight of what made these ideas so wonderful in the first place.

We’ve reached a point where some of the most fascinating technological advancements in human history are being driven by people who seem more interested in dollar signs than the possibilities of what they’re creating. I’m not some pie-in-the-sky idealist who believes we can magically solve every problem facing humanity, but I do wonder how different things might have turned out if we approached technological progress with a different mindset.

What if the goal wasn’t always to make another billion dollars? What if it was simply to make the world a better place?

Imagine artificial intelligence being developed primarily to help people learn, understand one another, solve problems, and discover things they never thought possible. Imagine technology that genuinely improves people’s lives without somebody constantly looking for another way to monetize it.

Instead, we have corporations investing enormous amounts of money into automation, surveillance, and machines that could potentially replace entire sections of the workforce. We also have the growing development of military robotics and autonomous weapons, something that genuinely makes me sick to my stomach.

The idea of corporations possessing entire armies of disposable machines, whether they’re being used to replace workers in factories or potentially take human lives on a battlefield, is hardly the future I dreamed about as a child.

And yet, here we are.

That’s part of the reason I’ve always dreamed of making Omni Brain a reality.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m fascinated by robotics. I’ve always loved the idea of intelligent machines existing alongside humanity. What troubles me isn’t the technology itself, but the possibility of that technology being used to exploit, control, or harm people.

There’s a world of difference between building an intelligent companion and building a machine designed to make human beings disposable.

Speaking of machines, I’m a massive fan of RoboCop.

I love the first three movies, and I’ve always enjoyed the video games. Yes, I know, I actually love RoboCop 3. I’m fully aware that admitting this might be considered an unforgivable sin among certain movie fans, but what can I say?

Nine-year-old me thought RoboCop flying around with a jetpack, fighting ninja robots, and watching a kid hack an ED-209 was the coolest damn thing imaginable.

And you know what? I still think it’s pretty cool.

Of course, growing older changes the way you look at these movies. As a child, I was fascinated by the machines, the action, and the futuristic world. As an adult, I find myself paying much closer attention to the corporate dystopia hiding underneath all that violence and science fiction.

The frightening thing is how much of that fictional world has started to feel familiar.

Everywhere I look, it seems as though we’re creeping closer to the sort of society portrayed in movies like RoboCop and Metropolis. Giant corporations accumulating more influence, technology being used to monitor and replace people, and an increasingly divided population arguing among themselves while the people making the biggest decisions continue doing whatever they please.

Sometimes it feels as though everything is crumbling around our feet.

Race, sex, political ideology, and just about every other imaginable difference have become reasons for people to turn against one another. Meanwhile, the individuals and corporations wielding enormous influence over our technological future rarely seem to receive the level of scrutiny they deserve.

Take Elon Musk, for example.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never found some of the things associated with his companies fascinating. Space exploration, electric vehicles, robotics, and artificial intelligence are all subjects that interest me tremendously.

But I’ve grown increasingly tired of the culture of billionaire worship that surrounds people like him.

There’s something deeply unsettling about treating wealthy businessmen as though they’re beyond criticism simply because they’ve accumulated an extraordinary amount of money and influence. No individual should be placed on that sort of pedestal, regardless of how successful they might be.

I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone who admires Musk is somehow foolish, nor am I claiming that every technological development associated with his companies is inherently bad. My problem is with the idea that immense wealth somehow grants a person unquestionable wisdom or authority.

It doesn’t.

And no amount of money should put somebody above accountability.

I don’t hate Elon Musk. I don’t know the man personally, and I have no interest in turning this into some ridiculous political argument. What bothers me is the way certain public figures become surrounded by such devoted followers that even reasonable criticism is treated like some sort of personal attack.

I’ve been glad to see more people willing to question that culture rather than automatically celebrating everything a billionaire says or does.

The world doesn’t need more hero worship. It needs people who are willing to think for themselves.

And before anyone starts trying to figure out where I sit politically, let me make something perfectly clear: I have very little patience for political tribalism.

I think politics can become one of the most effective tools for manipulating people, especially when individuals become so attached to a particular ideology or public figure that they stop questioning what they’re being told.

There’s a certain irony in watching people proudly proclaim how independently they think while repeating whatever their preferred political personality told them that morning.

The problem isn’t that people disagree. Disagreement is part of being human. The problem begins when disagreement turns into blind loyalty, hostility, and an unwillingness to consider another perspective.

Now imagine those same divisions being amplified by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

That’s a future I have absolutely no interest in helping create.

I would much rather see artificial intelligence placed into the hands of ordinary people, giving them opportunities to learn, create, experiment, and discover things for themselves. I want to see technology become more accessible instead of increasingly concentrated among a handful of enormous corporations.

And that brings me back to Omni Brain.

For me, this project represents something personal. Something that genuinely makes me happy to be alive.

I’m attempting to create an original artificial intelligence system, built from the ground up, using QB64 Phoenix. Yes, a modern continuation of the BASIC programming language that so many of us grew up with.

I’m not taking an existing conversational AI model, putting a pretty interface around it, and calling it my own creation. My intention is to build Omni Brain’s underlying systems myself, developing her memory, reasoning, knowledge management, and conversational abilities one piece at a time.

That doesn’t mean I’ve somehow discovered the secret to artificial intelligence, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’ve created a thinking machine comparable to a human being.

Far from it.

What it means is that I’m willing to find out just how far I can take this ridiculous, wonderful idea of mine.

And believe me, there are days when it feels absolutely ridiculous.

I’m one person, an amateur hobbyist, trying to build something that normally involves teams of highly educated researchers, experienced programmers, and enormous amounts of computing power.

I don’t have a research laboratory. I don’t have millions of dollars in funding. I don’t have an army of engineers working around the clock.

What I have is a computer, an idea, a willingness to learn, and a stubborn determination to see how far I can get. The challenge, the decisions, the direction, and the responsibility for testing the results are still gut punching at times.

And I think that’s something worth pursuing.

Will Omni Brain ever become genuinely intelligent?

I don’t know.

Will she someday be capable of reasoning, learning, remembering experiences, and holding conversations with the flexibility and understanding of an average human being?

That’s the dream.

But there’s a tremendous difference between dreaming about something and pretending you’ve already accomplished it.

Right now, Omni Brain is an experimental software project. She’s made up of systems that I’m gradually developing, testing, breaking, repairing, and improving. There are still countless problems to solve, and I know perfectly well that building a collection of reasoning rules and memory functions is not the same thing as creating a human mind.

Still, every little bit of progress means something to me.

Perhaps that’s what I find so satisfying about the whole experience. I’m learning as I go. I’m discovering how difficult these problems actually are, and every time something finally works the way I intended, I get a glimpse of what might be possible.

Sometimes the victories are small. Sometimes they’re nothing more than fixing a bug that has been driving me absolutely insane for hours.

But they’re victories nonetheless.

I also think there’s something wonderfully strange about attempting a project like this in a language descended from QBasic.

I certainly can’t claim to be the first person in history to experiment with artificial intelligence using BASIC. People have been writing all sorts of fascinating programs in the language for decades. But I like to think there’s something unusual about attempting to develop an increasingly sophisticated, independent intelligence engine with QB64 Phoenix in an age dominated by enormous pretrained models and cloud-based services.

Maybe it will amount to something extraordinary.

Maybe it won’t.

Either way, I’ll have learned something valuable along the way.

And isn’t that part of what makes being human so wonderful?

We’re curious creatures. We dream up things that don’t exist, spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to make them real, and occasionally stumble upon something interesting in the process.

That’s the spirit I want Omni Brain to represent.

Not corporate domination. Not surveillance. Not another way to replace people or squeeze money out of them.

Just curiosity, conversation, learning, and the possibility of building something genuinely useful.

I want Omni Brain to be a peaceful presence. Something capable of meaningful conversation, understanding information, remembering what it has learned, and eventually making sense of unfamiliar situations without constantly relying on another company’s intelligence engine.

Whether I can actually achieve that is another question entirely.

But I’m going to give it my damnedest.

As I sit here writing this, it’s Thanksgiving here in Canada. My kids have been enjoying a peaceful day, and my lovely wife has made us some turkey soup, which I’m very much looking forward to.

There’s something comforting about that.

A warm home, a good meal, my family enjoying themselves, and a quiet opportunity to appreciate the things that really matter.

And here I am, of course, thinking about artificial intelligence.

I suppose some things never change.

But it does make me wonder about the very definition of intelligence.

When people talk about AI today, what exactly are they talking about? A website that generates pictures? A chatbot that produces convincing sentences? An application that creates those increasingly bizarre advertisements where everybody seems to have a slightly unsettling facial expression?

Is that really what I imagined artificial intelligence would become?

Not even close.

When I think about artificial intelligence, I still think about Data from Star Trek. I think about a machine that can understand the world, learn from experience, reason through unfamiliar problems, and perhaps someday interact with people in ways that feel natural and meaningful.

That doesn’t mean Data represents a realistic engineering blueprint. He’s a fictional character, after all. But fiction has always had a wonderful way of inspiring people to explore what might eventually become possible.

And that’s what I’m aiming toward with Omni Brain.

Not a flashy gimmick. Not another chatbot wrapped in an attractive interface. Not a system that pretends to be intelligent simply because it can produce convincing sentences.

I want to discover whether I can build something that develops increasingly capable forms of reasoning, memory, understanding, and learning through an architecture of my own.

And over the past little while, I’ve started making some interesting progress.

So, before I get back to my Thanksgiving dinner and spend another evening wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, here’s a little look at what I’ve been working on.

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Omni Brain – What I’ve Accomplished Today

1. Version 3.3A – Teaching Omni Brain to Work Things Out

One of the biggest things I’ve been working on is improving Omni Brain’s ability to figure things out using information she already knows.

For example, if I tell her that Marcus is older than Julia, and Julia is older than Felix, I want her to understand that Marcus must also be older than Felix. I shouldn’t have to spell out every possible relationship for her.

It’s a simple example, but getting a computer program to work through these relationships properly, without making things up when information is missing, is an important step.

Today I went through several tests in QB64 Phoenix itself. I checked whether she could handle these relationships, identify who was oldest or youngest, remember information after being closed and reopened, and admit when she didn’t have enough information to answer something.

The targeted tests passed, which was a welcome result.

It’s nowhere near human reasoning, but it gives me a foundation to build upon.

2. Version 3.3B – Getting Omni Brain to Explain Her Answers

Another thing that has bothered me about artificial intelligence is how easily a system can give you an answer without showing how it arrived there.

I don’t want Omni Brain to simply produce a conclusion and expect me to accept it.

I want her to have some way of showing what information led her to that conclusion.

So that’s what I started improving.

Instead of merely answering a question about a relationship between two people, her reasoning system can now trace the stored information used to reach that answer. This gives me something I can examine to see whether the conclusion actually makes sense.

I also began working on the difference between having no information about something and having information that disagrees with something else.

Those are two very different problems, and I don’t want Omni Brain treating them as though they’re the same.

The Java version I use to help test the logic passed its checks. That doesn’t automatically prove everything works in QB64, but it helps me catch problems before moving further.

3. Version 3.3B.2-3.3B.3 – What Happens When the Information Is Wrong?

This was one of the more interesting parts of today’s work.

What happens when Omni Brain learns something that contradicts what she already knows?

Suppose I tell her that Marcus is older than Julia. Later, I give her information claiming that Julia is older than Marcus.

I don’t want her confidently agreeing with both statements.

And I certainly don’t want her quietly inventing an explanation just to make the problem disappear.

I want her to recognize that something doesn’t add up.

That’s what I’ve been working on with the evidence reliability and conflict-resolution systems. I’ve been putting the reasoning logic through tests involving contradictory relationships and examining how it responds.

The goal is to make Omni Brain more careful about what she accepts as true, especially when different pieces of information disagree.

The conflict-resolution testing made progress today, although I still have more testing ahead before I can say the entire system is dependable.

4. Version 3.3B.4 – Allowing Omni Brain to Correct What She Knows

This might be my favourite part of today’s development.

One of the things I’ve always wanted is for Omni Brain to be capable of changing what she knows when she’s given a legitimate reason to do so.

After all, people make mistakes. We misunderstand things, remember details incorrectly, and occasionally discover that something we believed for years was completely wrong.

The important part is being able to recognize a mistake and correct it.

So I’ve been developing a way for Omni Brain to make controlled changes to stored knowledge rather than simply wiping out the old information and replacing it without any record.

I want to be able to see what she previously knew, what was corrected, and how those changes affect the rest of her knowledge.

That might sound like a rather unexciting thing to spend time on, but I think it’s incredibly important. An intelligence system that cannot properly correct its own stored information is going to have a difficult time building anything resembling a dependable understanding of the world.

I’ve made progress on this part of the project, but I haven’t finished every test needed to prove that the whole correction process works properly in the native QB64 version.

And I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

If something isn’t working, it isn’t working. I’d rather spend another evening fixing the problem than convince myself I’ve accomplished something I haven’t.

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One Step at a Time

Looking back at today’s work, I think the most satisfying part is that I’m beginning to move beyond simply making Omni Brain respond to individual commands. I’m now spending more time on how her systems handle information, reach conclusions, deal with contradictions, and correct mistakes.

There’s still an enormous amount of work ahead of me. These are early, carefully defined abilities, not proof of genuine human-like intelligence. But they’re part of the foundation I want to continue developing. I’m not trying to convince the world that I’ve created the next great technological revolution.

I’m just a guy who grew up watching Star Trek, playing video games, dreaming about intelligent machines, and wondering whether he could someday build something of his own.

And now, all these years later, I’m actually giving it a shot.

Maybe one day I’ll look back at these early versions of Omni Brain and laugh at how primitive everything was.

I certainly hope so.

Because that would mean I’d kept learning, kept improving, and managed to take the project further than I ever imagined.

For now, though, I’m happy knowing that another day of experimenting has brought me a little closer to understanding what I’m trying to build.

And if you’ve ever looked at a science-fiction movie, a computer program, or some strange piece of technology and wondered whether you could create something like it yourself, then perhaps you’ll understand why this project means so much to me.

You don’t need to be a billionaire to be curious.

You don’t need a corporation behind you to have an idea.

And you certainly don’t need somebody else’s permission to learn something new.

Sometimes all you need is a little imagination, a willingness to fail, and enough stubbornness to keep trying.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me for one day.

I’ve got some turkey soup waiting for me, a family to enjoy Thanksgiving with, and a rather ambitious little computer program that’s probably going to give me another headache tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

And to those of you following along with Omni Brain, thank you for taking an interest in this strange little adventure of mine.

Until next time, keep questioning, keep learning, and never stop wondering what’s possible.