Does AI Need Guts to Get to the Singularity?

We all have our favorite capacity/organ that we fail modern-day AI for not having, and that we think it needs to have to get truly intelligent machines. For some it's consciousness, for others it is common sense, emotion, heart, or soul. What if it came down to a gut? That we need to make our AI have the capacity to get hungry, and slake that hunger with food, for the next real breakthrough? There's some new information on the role of gut microbes in brain development that's worth some mental mastication in this regard (PNAS via PhysOrg). Rochellys Diaz Heijtza and Sven Pettersson and colleagues raised mice in a germ free environment and compared them to mice raised with normal gut bugs. The researchers found that compared to the germ-free mice, the normal mice had reduced expression of two brain molecules, synaptophysin, and PSD-95, in a region of the brain ...