Source: Mic
When do scientists believe computers will surpass the human brain?
August 3, 2015 12:30pm by Barry Ritholtz
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So if mice can make 10^11 calculations per second per $1000 and humans 10^15 then I guess that if we couple 10^4 mice brains together they could write a computer program?
Or maybe a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters for a million years?
I think that is how Microsoft developed Windows.
I doubt this count of human computational capability takes into account recent neurological findings like this: http://caltechconf.library.caltech.edu/21/
IANAN, but my understanding of the paper above is that dendrites themselves can have independent computational capabilities whereas the basic unit of computation per se was previously thought to be neurons. This makes a difference of at least a few orders of magnitude. In addition to that the brain is more like a combined digital and analog system with discrete neurotransmitters that modulate electrochemical signals that can vary continuously. It’s apples to oranges in comparison with a purely digital computer, although I guess the quantum/optical/DNA computers referred to in the chart would work more like a brain.
Long story short, even as Moore’s law continues, I wouldn’t hold my breath on computers surpassing the human brain in the next few decades. Maybe by the close of this century.
I’m sure 10,000 mice with a proper IDE & source control could pull off Tetris.
Alllow me to edit the title
“When Does Ray Kurzweil* Believe Computers Will Surpass HIS Brain?”
FIXED!
* not a neuroscientist, nor a computer scientist: twenty ‘honorary’ doctorates.
When do scientists believe computers will surpass the human brain?
If they are referring to my brain the answer is never.
Perhaps an AI would not need to surpass the processing power of a human brain, perhaps it would only need to eliminate a lot of the innate logic that supports human biases and magical thought.
If we could work around the ways that people think that are counter-productive, perhaps a TRS-80 might out-think a human.
But the one thing that we DEFINITELY ought not do is to try and make a machine that thinks in the same way as we do … imagine a psychopathic/sociopathic AI that thinks a million times faster than its humans “assistants”.
IF … the biggest word in the English language.
It is understandable that cognitive scientists compare AI to the human mind because human minds are something we know something about (how much something is always open to debate of course) but comparing computers and computation to the human brain or what the brain does is frankly ridiculous: This is a major category error, ungrounded empirically and logically at least in neurobiological terms, and the use of computational speed as a measure or qualia of intelligence is frankly scientistic gibberish.
I’ve seen other articles in cognitive science that seem to confuse power or agency with cognition or consciousness — can’t actually observe a difference from the outside goes the argument but it does stuff like we imagine we do (Skinnerian behaviorism in a different bottle as it were) — but the real imaginative background of such discussions, whether explicit or not, is of a world where humans lose control of what they have created in part because they no longer understand it.
When multiple key functions of what we term the human mind are simulated the result will not be human and it will only teach us something about ourselves in the sense that Commander Data of Star Trek did: an alien intelligence willing and able to talk about becoming human because human is what it wished to seem.
“Be what you wish to seem” –Socrates (if you’re going to steal then steal from the best)
Why set the bar for computers so low?
Already passed the Tea Party brain in 1990.
please be aware that AI is not (not only, to be more precise) a matter of computing power. Intelligence means, operationally, the capability to interact with changes in “environment”. This implies that even if you have never been in Milan, Italy, you can find a way to feed yourself. Computing power based pseudo-AI has a map of all the food selling places in Milan, and gps positioning, but this is certainly not artificial intelligence. The core of intelligence is freedom (that is out of the brute computing power) but how do you code a program that it has to be self-coding by interactions ? It’s a matter of research, but there is one more detail : if an AI machine has power to interact with objects, that is applying forces to masses, you have become a lesser God. In my opinion no “freedom based” computing should be attempted, since Darwinian laws are below life rules. AI systems will necessarly be Darwinian, and so competing with Homo Sapiens, mereover with all of Home Sapiens knowledge available right from time zero.
“you have become a lesser God” with tacit fact that you have created the AI thing