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0 pointsbad_user11y ago0 comments

I do not think that we have the capacity to create a brain capable of being conscious with our current technology. Storing zeroes and ones deterministically on pieces of silicon with crammed together transistors and doing computations by what are basically logical gates is kind of limiting and inefficient. And lets say that the teraflops we're talking about are meaningful. How many teraflops do we need anyway? Shouldn't Google's data-centers suffice already for reaching the potential of a piece of gray matter that fits in under 60 cm of circumference?

I also agree that AI will never be "human" (i.e. it will be different), however without understanding how the human brain works, what chances do we have to create AI?

And we have yet to crack that nut. We have yet to understand even high-level stuff in detail, like how information is flowing from short-term memory to long-term and how we forget and why we do that (i.e. forgetfulness is surely an evolutionary trait). A brain is also fascinating in how it recovers from serious strokes by re-purposing brain structures. We have yet to produce software that is that sophisticated. And we don't even understand the brain from a biological perspective yet.

Surely huge progresses have been made, but on the other hand we may still be hundreds of years away and there's a very real possibility that we lack the intellectual capability, or maybe the resources to do it (we have a history of settling for lesser solutions if we stop seeing financial benefits, like with space exploration).

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seiji11y ago· 1 in thread

> Storing zeroes and ones deterministically

Turing-complete platforms are universal simulators. There's nothing they can't represent.

> like how information is flowing from short-term memory to long-term

Sure, we know that. The little seahorse helps out.

> re-purposing brain structures

rudimentary artificial neural nets do the same thing. they also self-specialize automatically with no innate programming (line detectors, edge detectors, eye detectors, cat detectors, all the way up—automatically).

> we may still be hundreds of years away

lol. nope. gotta think exponentially.

> lesser solutions if we stop seeing financial benefits, like with space exploration

can't do space exploration without the approval of a nation-state. can do AI tomfoolery in your own basement with nobody else finding out until it's too late.

alexlarsson11y ago

> Turing-complete platforms are universal simulators. There's nothing they can't represent.

No existing computer is a universal turing machine. The infinite ram requirement is pretty hard to implement in practice.

aidenn011y ago· 1 in thread

> Storing zeroes and ones deterministically on pieces of silicon with crammed together transistors and doing computations by what are basically logical gates is kind of limiting and inefficient.

And yet it is less limiting and more efficient than pretty much all analog computing devices we have built. I don't think the hardware is the issue anymore, I suspect that with the right models and training we can have thinking machines.

dkersten11y ago

Jeff Hawkins' team of researchers and the people behind NuPIC and Numenta.org, at least, given how it was explained to me, believe that the human brain does compute digitally (ie the analog values don't matter, the presence or absence of the signals do). Geoff Hinton also appears to believe that the biological neural signals are interpreted in a binary way.

I could have misinterpreted their work, though, as I'm far from an expert, but that's what it sounded like to me.

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