om Tonite me wanna mumble about the issue of hardware overhang that we're now facing.
One long-standing worry in AGI research is that if the date of it's development is delayed too long then, once it is developed, that it would quickly become vastly superhuman before it could be studied/debugged/understood/controlled, etc. Have a look at: http://www.cryengine.com/ This is what our current hardware can do, if it weren't being programmed by the chimps who make desktop applications. A top-end graphics card can crank that out in ultra-high resolution at up to 60fps... So, who among you is going to stand up and state a serious case that what we have now in a high-end desktop or a $15k compute-optimized server isn't anywhere close to achieving human intelligence? One issue is the uploader's mentality. They derive their estimates for general AI from their estimates for brain emulation. As I've said many times before, and here again, A pure AGI architecture will be several orders of magnitude more efficient than any conceivable brain emulation, except those that have been abstracted so far that there is barely even the most tenuous resemblance to the original. Superhuman AI will be available at least a decade before mind uploading and mind uploading cannot result in a superhuman mind (without violating the premise on which the argument in favor of identity is based). The reason brain emulation is so expensive is that it is trying to emulate synaptic junctions when the actual unit of functionality is the neural ensemble (on the order of a few hundred neurons). It is difficult to quantify the information content of neural signalling but the key is that it takes dozens of neurons to communicate just a single scalar value. The brain does things that way because of the uncertainties of the metabolic environment and the necessity of maintaining extremely high reliability over the lifetime of the individual, irrespective of the life-cycles of the individual cells. Modern computers operate on very different principles and therefore can only be compared to neural circuits in the broadest outlines. Just about every area of the brain that has been reverse engineered to the point where we can say "this is a circuit for doing X", we have already surpassed the measured performance by many orders of magnitude. The only reason that this hardware overhang hasn't been recognized is that people still suck at programming and because people are very protective of their egos. If they felt inferior to a pile-O-parts, that would make them feel really bad. So therefore they point at every available example of AI failing and pronounce that it is because our biology is that much awesomer. -- It's not. Even now. Okay, now let me hit you with a new, and much more important, concept. I call this concept "Algorithmic Backlog" For hundreds of years now, we have been developing mathematics and algorithms that, in many cases, are much more effective at solving a wide variety of problems than the general purpose but, ultimately, approximate pattern matching techniques our brains use. The most important qualitative difference between AI thinking and human (or upload) thinking is that the AGI can incorporate many of the algorithmic advances we have made over the years directly. It's not clear exactly how many such algorithms can be applied but It's a pretty sure bet that the answer is more than none. It is not at all clear what the overall implications of all of these issues are, except for one thing. AI can happen Real Soon Now. -- IQ is a measure of how stupid you feel. Powers are not rights. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
