> On Jun 26, 2015, at 12:43 PM, Tim Tyler <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 26/06/2015 14:01, Dean Pomerleau wrote: >> The reason I think this interesting and relevant is that many high profile >> people (e.g. singularity economist Robin Hanson) see WBE as the most likely >> path to AGI because on the surface it seems like all that is required is >> straightforward engineering - all we need is better scanning methods (e.g. >> extending vitrification techniques already apparently quite good for mice to >> work for human-sized brains), straightforward extension of current neural >> modeling techniques (e.g. refinement to Hodgkin-Huxley model of neurons) and >> more powerful computers on which to run the emulations. > > I never bought into this. Areoplanes aren't scanned birds. The motor car > wasn't > a scanned horse and cart. Submarines aren't scanned fish. Computers aren't > scanned brains.
This is such an important point. Even if we had the necessary brain scanning technology, the computational structures of the brain cannot be efficiently emulated using conventional computing substrates. The implementations reflect the structure and capabilities of the fundamental materials they are built from. A scanned brain AGI would be obscenely inefficient on silicon to the point where it might not even have economic value (e.g. within the physics and engineering limits of silicon fabrication the emulation could be much slower than an actual human brain). There is a reason no one does their computing by emulating a Turing machine on top of conventional silicon. While the computing models are theoretically equivalent, there is an extreme performance penalty for moving too far from the physical model of computation, even if the model is amenable to an optimized silicon implementation. ------------------------------------------- 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
