Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > >> > >> all this hand wringing over consciousness is a waste of time because >> we already know as much as we're ever going to know about that. > >
> > Perhaps you're right, but on the other hand nobody is forcing you to have > the discussion. I'm happy to discuss AI if you want. OK, lets put aside the question of consciousness and talk about intelligence. AI has made a lot of progress in just the last few years, the most spectacular example is Google's AlphaGO that defeated the worlds best human player at GO, the most difficult board game around, 3 games to zero. The most impressive thing is it didn't win by brute force as IBM did with chess 20 years ago when its computer became the wold chess champion ; instead of human experts telling the computer how to win AlphaGO played millions of games against itself and its electronic neural network learned the best strategies in much the same way as a novice human GO player practices and learns ways to win and become a grandmaster. AlphaGO 's learning algorithm may be better than humans at GO but it is very specialized and can't compare to the skillful way a 3 year old learns all sorts of things about how the world works. So is the human brain's general learning algorithm so astronomically complex that it will never be incorporated into a computer, or at least not for many millennium? I would argue that we know for a fact it can't be all that complex and thus human level and above general AI can't be very far away. We don't yet know what the brain's master learning algorithm is but we can put upper limits on how complex that algorithm can be. In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to 750 meg. Just 750 meg, that's about the same amount of information as a old CD disk could hold when they first came out 35 years ago! And all that 750 meg certainly can NOT be used just for the master learning software algorithm, you've got to leave room for instructions on how to build a human body as well as the brain hardware. So the information MUST contain wiring directions such as "wire up a neuron this way and then repeat that procedure exactly the same way 917 billion times". And the 750 meg isn't even efficiently coded, there is a ridiculous amount of redundancy in the human genome. So there is no way, absolutely no way, the master algorithm can be very complex . I'll bet it's less than a meg in size, possibly a lot less. If random mutation and natural selection can find it then it's just a matter of time before we do too. And it won't take 500 million years to find either. John K Clark -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
