On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 06:34:51PM -0700, Pierz wrote: > > No - we are hitting limits now in terms of miniaturization that are posing > serious challenges to the continuation of Moore's law. So far, engineers > have - more or less - found ways of working around these problems, but this > can't continue indefinitely.
Hmm we're hitting limits to what can be achieved with 2D lithographic processes on silicon, although exotic negative refractive index materials may well allow lithographic techniques to be scaled to much smaller than the wavelength of UV. This means there will probably be a "bump" in store for Moore's law shortly. But we're still a long way from fundemental physics limitations. Where to from here? Probably the most obvious is the move to 3D. But that direction will bump into thermal limits pretty soon, as a 3D object tends lower surface to volume ratios. So the answer will probably need to involve exotic materials - maybe Gallium, or maybe the memristor stuff HP is working on. Or organic transitors. There's any number of ideas in the research lab, that might be the successor to current VLSI technology. >However, it's really a subsidiary point. If we > require 1000x the power of a modern laptop, that's easily (if somewhat > expensively) achieved with parallelization, a la Google's PC farms. Of > course this only helps if we parallelize our AI algorithms, but given the > massive parallelism of the brain, this should be something we'd be doing > anyway. Most of the machine learning algorithms (our most succesful AI algorithms) are quite parallel as it is. Do you really think the learning algorithm behind Google's language translation tool runs as a single process task? And yet I don't think anyone would argue that they could achieve > human-like intelligence even with all of Google's PCs roped together. It's > an article of faith that all that is required is a programming > breakthrough. I seriously doubt it. I believe that human intelligence is > fundamentally linked to qualia (consciousness), and I've yet to be > convinced that we have any understanding of that yet. There is a simpler task that doesn't involve qualia (unless you happen to be a creationist). Create a creative evolutionary system that mimics biological evolution in continuously creating new solutions to problems. I suspect that once that problem is understood, the step to genuine AGI will be rather short. Of course, we'll probably still be arguing over whether those AGIs are conscious or not, but as Brent notes, maybe that particular question will then become uninteresting... -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
