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"Yep. That goes a long way towards explaining the complete lack of innovation in the computer industry. Basically nothing has improved or even changed in the last 30 years."

More true than one might think at first: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/08/09/1641249/back-to-the-future-of-programming

See also:
"The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" by Alan Kay
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf
http://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/kay.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

Personally, cross-platform reasonable speedy VisualWorks Smalltalk from the 1990s in many ways still has not been surpassed (except in the sense it was not free and open source and somewhat lesser stuff like Python and now Java is). The Newton's 1990s view of a PDA with integrated soups of data is still (in some ways) advanced beyond Android. Or from:
http://inventors.about.com/od/istartinventions/a/internet.htm
"Vannevar Bush first proposed the basics of hypertext in 1945 [in "As We May Think"]. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) in 1990."
Project Xanadu was around in the 1980s doing Hypertext, inspired by Theodore Sturegon's 1950 short story "The Skills of Xanadu".

Don't confuse the eventual implementation of part of old ideas (like Kay's 1970s DynaBook vision being realized in part in today's laptops and smartphones) with the notion of conceptual progress.

Even much of robotics and AI is just old ideas finally being more workable with better hardware.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
"The stupendous growth and competitiveness of the computer industry is one reason. A less appreciated one is that intelligent machine research did not make steady progress in its first fifty years, it marked time for thirty of them! Though general computer power grew a hundred thousand fold from 1960 to 1990, the computer power available to AI programs barely budged from 1 MIPS during those three decades. "

Still, it is also true there are no doubt many innovations now lurking here or there for which we have not yet hear much of. As WIlliam Gibson said:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-here-it-s-just-not-evenly
"The future is already here â" it's just not evenly distributed."

Much of what young kids are interested in is what they have seen in movies, read in stories, or played with in games, and so on. True, they may sometimes put things together in new ways. But its still very often old, old ideas they are working with.

Unfortunately, such a direct comparison is reductionist to the point of being meaningless. You may like this related article: When will computer hardware match the human brain?

It has been hypothesized (by Anders Sandberg and others) that an advanced intelligence might convert a Jupiter sized mass into one large diamond computational substrate - a "Jupiter brain." Now this object is rather larger than Sandberg predicts :

"...a compact diamond structure would have a maximum radius on the order of 9760 km, somewhat larger than the Earth. Having the density doubles the possible radius and quadruples the mass, which suggests a trade-off between internal delays and computing power"

but this super-brain could presumably power itself from the nearby neutron star (thereby solving another problem mentioned by Sandberg), and surely could figure out some means of making the larger structure stable, maybe by rotation.

So, if this object was a "Jupiter brain," how could we tell from here ?

I am not disagreeing that information about space or life in other places would be interesting. These days I tend to think that bacteria came from outside the solar system myself, given how hardy bacteria is, and how statistically it would just be more likely it came from elsewhere with one small Earth and one big universe. I'm disagreeing with how compelling that would be as a call to action in current US society. As in, "Oh, gee, cute seamonsters on Europa. Now, what kind of cosmetics should we be producing to make the most money?"
http://www.skininc.com/treatments/cosmetics/16814576.html
"Global color cosmetics sales reached $36.8 billion in 2007, ..."

It has been said more people have walked on the Moon than have been to the bottom of the "deep ocean floor".
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_part_of_the_ocean_has_been_least_explored

We even have AI about to emerge seriously in twenty years or so (let alone new human/machine hybrids). Big yawn by most people.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if we took all that money that goes into a search for life in space and put it towards helping understand and preserve life around Earth. One example of where the money would be better spent:
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine."

A few hundred billion spent on sustainable and resilient infrastructure done in a free and open source way, would let us bootstrap our civilization to the stars. In that sense, all the money spend on big science of other sorts has just kept us from creating space habitats. Related, on my own (self-funded) efforts to that end:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563102&cid=31279590

Basically, the scientists at NASA have politically triumphed over the engineers. So, NASA does amazing scientific experiments with, for the most part, 1960s technology, with lots of money for science but comparatively little for innovation (and of course, the Shuttle has eaten up most of NASA's budget in general, anyway, so the engineers and scientists were just fighting over scraps left over). And beyond that, there are records showing how NASA has from the start been primarily funded for military goals (to demonstrate intimidating technical leadership):
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK+Library+and+Museum/News+and+Press/JFK+Library+Releases+White+House+Tape+on+Space+Race.htm
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1
"We know that such recordings can shed substantial light on Kennedy's thinking on space because of another tape that was released five years ago and gained a surprising amount of media attention in the sleepy month of August 2001. That recording, number 60 in the Kennedy Library, concerned a November 1962 meeting between Kennedy, Webb, and several other top White House and NASA officials to discuss the NASA budget. During that meeting, Kennedy made the comment that "I'm not that interested in space..." explaining that he supported the lunar program because it was a race against the Soviets: "the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that's why we're doing it," Kennedy explained."

O

In terms of pure bit rate of calculations, we should have commodity desktop computers capable of outperforming our own brains within a decade. This paper (from 1997, but I doubt human brains have changed much since then) estimates our brainpower at 100 million MIPS, or 10^14 calculations per second. By comparison a Radeon HD4870 x2 graphics card is 2.4 TFlops (2.4 million MIPS at 1 flop/instruction), or roughly 1/5th of a human brain.

OK, so a brain is worth five graphics cards.

But then, the brain only needs about 20 Watt. With five graphics cards, that would be 4 Watt per graphics card.

In terms of pure bit rate of calculations, we should have commodity desktop computers capable of outperforming our own brains within a decade. This paper (from 1997, but I doubt human brains have changed much since then) estimates our brainpower at 100 million MIPS, or 10^14 calculations per second. By comparison a Radeon HD4870 x2 graphics card is 2.4 TFlops (2.4 million MIPS at 1 flop/instruction), or roughly 1/5th of a human brain.

Old school advice...

First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story. ... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."

The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."

Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."

And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis

The hopeful social outcome of all this increase in productivity was talked about as far back as 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
in a letter sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964 called "The Triple Revolution".

Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.

By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm )
See also:

Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per
price per decade. By the time any toddler of today is finishing
graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade)
multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about
a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are
about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at
constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!)
According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS
processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think
correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking
advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal
improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such).
(somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation).
Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by
cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit,
but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for
continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there,
producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages
per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often
now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple,
since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a
million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster,
though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million
processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and
processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet
in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say,

Ok, according to moore's law we will get there, with a transistor based computer. I believe the idea is to create the hardware equivelant of a neuron. Something like Asimov's positronic brain. Currently the modern computer is little more than a highly programmable calculator. The idea in this case is to create a computer that can learn or repurpose it's transistors/neurons.

The end goal is to create more advanced computers or software. You'd do better venting your religious frustrations against scientists in the genetics industry where the end goal is more advance people or thoughts.

People have difficulty with existence all the time, look up the many many schools of thought regarding Metaphysics. Basically we don't know shit, spouting out the old arguement thet we are more simply because of a mystical understanding is crap. Humans are bio-bots with a 3lb multithreaded cpu made up of grey and white matter. Get over it, computers are going to pass us in 30years. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

Be hard for us to have a computer that has the processing and storage potential of the human brain when those aren't known.

While Hans Moravec guestimates, by extrapolating from known capabilities of the retina to process image inputs, a brain has a processing capacity of 100 trillion instructions per second, and is likely to be surpassed by computers by 2030. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

That is a guestimate at best.

Furthermore the Brain unlike a computer is able to do amazing things even when it has suffered terrible damage, see Kim Peek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek

I'd go on, but I'm off to the Doctor about my Stroke damaged brain :)

Yeah, well what happened to that Chess Prize challenge, offered to anyone who can build a computer program that could beat a grandmaster? IBM came up with Deep Blue, that had chess moves implemented in hardware. It beat the world chess champion. Did they do it for the money? Yeah, sure, what a great investment it must have been! Wall Street was in ecstasy! IBM's computer beat Kasparov! Weee! And their stock instantly went through the roof because of the huge income from that prize! These things are not about profit from the prize, but for prestige. The profit from these feats comes later, perhaps a century later, the amount money is just a symbol, of relative significance.

I bet you anything that Deep Blue was a lot more costly than any kind of chess prize it could get in exchange. I bet you the whole Deep Blue project ended with a big number in red ink at the quarterly bottom line. Just like research, or even marketing keeps producing negative quarterly bottom lines. Try running a company without research or marketing - you're destinded for obsolescence and extinction. The Deep Blue project wasn't about immediate profit, but it was a significant step for humanity when it comes to artificial intelligence. One bastillon of what we used to call human intelligence striked down. We keep finding out that we're not that special, we're not the center of the universe - Copernicus, Darwin, Wohler, Deep Blue.. what's next? Our forward scouts, our humans of inhuman intelligence, such as accountant-number-adders, or grandmaster-chess-players, they keep retreating. The last bastillon of 'human intellgience' is probably gonna be held by women, in the form of interpesonal and social skills that they excel at and computers or even nerds really suck at, because these "manly" abstract but concrete mathematical challenges are more and more likely to be tackled by machines, way before they can engange in a pleasant conversation with any of us. See this

Similarly, successful extraction of moon oxygen is not just gonna be for "the prize", but it's a way to pave the future. One important thing that would result in having breathable oxygen is being able to create a self sustaining human+tropical rainforest ecosystem on the Moon, and on Mars, as an insurance policy against human stupidity here on Earth, against the nullifying effect of a WW3. Chances are humans won't be stupid enough to pull the nuclear trigger on each other, with the promise mututually assured destruction looming over their heads, but do you like betting chances? Let's talk to Mr. Murphy, and ask him to revise his Law. Here is the optimist version of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, except when chances of it going wrong are minute. Now, with this newfound optimism we can start betting chances! How about not having to bet when you don't have to, how about establishing certainty instead of having to rely on luck in a risk? How about having an ecosphere on the Moon and Mars who can be remote spectators to some idiotic WW3 going on down here on Earth, and they can just sit back in their couches and shake their heads, and say, "man, those idiots down there don't know what they are doing, they've all gone nuts!" The farther they can spectate from, the better chances they have of not getting involved. At least somebody then would survive, and when the dust settles on Earth, and radioactiviy dies down, a century later maybe, then these Moon and Mars and Saturn-freaks can take a trip back here, bring their rainforest seeds and their elephant babies and their kitties and rabbits with their Noah's Ark's along, and replant the rainforest, one seed at a time, and let earth turn green again, and the rainforests loud. They'd send a team of explorers, to boldly go where man has been before, except his stupidity got the best of him.

Besides such insurance policy against some imminent apocalypse, the success of moon-mineral processing would have relevance to raw material extracti

So, what is your definition of intelligence? I bet you sooner of later the top IQ test-scorer in the world will be a computer, well before we recognize it as artificial intelligence, because, while it will excel and pattern recognition, abstract conceptual manipulation and encyclopedic knowledge, it will be a while before it also excels at social interactions. I feel in this sense women hold the last bastillon of "human intelligence" instead of men, who already had to yield with such things as accountant and slide rule math-skills to simple calculators.

Actually, I did some research, and I realize I wasn't completely on the mark with my comments. I think the big two chip companies are moving somewhat in the right direction, with dual-core chips, though there is certainly a need for low power Transmeta chips for reading Slashdot, or at least the big players should drop the clockspeed to 1 Mhz when the CPU is idle, and only crank it to 5GHz when needed.

As far as off the mark goes, did you know that the human brain consumes humongous amounts of power? More exactly 20 Watts out of a 100 Watts resting pace, so even though it makes up only 2% of the body's weight, it consumes 20% of total energy/oxygen needs? So even this ever-perfected life runs the cpu "hot" relative to the rest of the system.

Also, by 2020-2050 we can expect real artificial intelligence if things keep up they way they do. We better start thinking about the consequences of what happens when machines are smarter, more intelligent, can hold wittier conversations, and make better supreme court judges than human beings. Is that something we can deal with, or trust?

" If 100 million MIPS could do the job of the human brain's 100 billion neurons, then one neuron is worth about 1/1,000 MIPS, i.e., 1,000 instructions per second. That's probably not enough to simulate an actual neuron, which can produce 1,000 finely timed pulses per second. Our estimate is for very efficient programs that imitate the aggregate function of thousand-neuron assemblies. Almost all nervous systems contain subassemblies that big."

extracted from "transhumanist

With 400million of these puppies tied together we've a potential 10^19 - 10^20 IPS machine.

> All it takes to simulate a human brain is 22.8 teraflops?
> I thought I was smarter than that.

A rough guess seems to come in at around 100 teraops or more.

In a paper by Hans Moravec, one guess is 10^14 instructions per second (Extrapolation of retina
equivalent computer operations.)

While another by Ralph Merkle, suggests 10^13 - 10^16 operations per second, based on power consumption,

and yet another by Robert McEachern suggests 10^17 FLOPS (Floating Point Operation Per Second, more comparable to computer based math and what is discussed here.)

1 x 10^12 = 1 Tera

Thusly, 10^13 = 10 T, 10^14 = 100 T, 10^15 = 1000 T or 1 P, 10^16 = 10 P, and 10^17 = 100 P (or 100,000 TeraOps)

These numbers of course all depend on the method of measurement, what is being measured, and how much bearing that particular feature matters..
Sorta as meaningless/meaningful as CPU MHZ speed goes, and likewise, comparing a computer to a brain is going to run into the same problem.

However I think its safe to say, that as long as the computers hardware works like it does and not like our brains, then it will need to simulate our hardware in software, and thus two numbers matter: 1) how fast the computer can simulate the various actions of nurons, and 2) how fast those nurons need to function to compare to a real brain. As with all forms of emulation, the host system needs to be faster than the target, usually to an order of magnatude or more...

However, they didn't really say their simulation would be running at full/live speed... Researchers can still learn alot from this even if it takes a day to process a minute or two of brain time...

I've actually heard the complexity bruited about as more like 100PFLOPS, given that it's not just the number of cells, but the number of axons, dendrites, receptors, and neurotransmitters.

Numbers like that arouse my skepticism. I wonder if there is any credible way to extrapolate computational capacity from power consumption; can 3lbs of grey matter powered by sugar possibly approach 100PFLOPS without vaporizing? Just how many FLOPS must be performed per synapse to do that?

Please, put away the pitchfork; I'm not making any claims. IANAB, and my credibility with regard to biology approaches zero. However, allow me to cite a paper that presumably has some credibility.

The most interesting part of that work, IMO:

There are considerations other than sheer scale. At 1 MIPS the best results come from finely hand-crafted programs that distill sensor data with utmost efficiency. 100-MIPS processes weigh their inputs against a wide range of hypotheses, with so many parameters, that learning programs adjust better than the overburdened programmers

Nature has had billions of years to write code. If you gave a large number of researchers several thousand years to squeeze maximum performance from 100-MIPS, what would you have?

To what degree do our highly discreet, digital methods limit our ability to emulate the mind? Brains are not discreet, precise mechanisms. Claiming to be able to quantify the capacity of a system we do not understand is highly suspect.

Yet, consider our progress. Today, we market mobile phones with speech recognition as incentives to sign up for service. Once the algorithm was understood we reduced it to a trivial "feature" using poor quality sensors and a few milli-watts of power. Hidden Markov Models make this possible, and I'm still astonished by it.

Simple introspection tells me a great deal about "memory." Our minds have amazing spatial memory; you can probably remember the layout of every place you have ever lived and most places you have visited. I can remember the significant aspects of every Quake map I have spent more than an hour running around "inside." How? Compression, probably. Our brains have managed to reduce spatial data to a tiny fraction of what we consider necessary. The algorithms involved are far beyond our understanding.

I believe, in the end, we will find our minds are actually low capacity, computationally inefficient systems that run profoundly complex, highly lossy algorithms. This bodes well if you wish to achieve sufficiently powerful computers; we probably already have them. The unknown, obviously, is how much time is necessary to "figure out" the methods of the mind.

Sorry for the unwarranted conclusion, but the second part of my claim may still be valid. That you have worked in a particular field (AI) doesn't automatically make you qualified to make claims about developments in this field more than a decade in the future.

Going back to your original post, the evidence that faster hardware means human and then more than human AI is as strong as it can be at this stage. We haven't found anything odd in the human brain that can't be simulated (and already simulated some parts). We found that individual neurons works in a rather simple way. We found that the brain is not a mysterious everything-connected-to-everything device, but a modular, rather crude and tolerant device. We also made significant process in brain scanning. All this leads to a conclusion that in a relatively near future (2-3 decades) it will be possible to simulate the human brain in silicon. Add a few more years and we might even simulate a brain that works.

This alone leads to more-than human AI as "an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware". Your comment about "past 50 years" is rather idiotic, because 1) computers basically started 50 years ago and 2) we know for certain that today's computers are very slow compared with a human brain. As for the brilliant techniques, Moravec comments on that. There are, indeed, many techniques that are impractical below a certain speed (as a matter of fact, most of techniques are that way).

It appears to me that you simply have a negative outlook towards technology (not 100% negative, mind you), and so you attempt to fit reality into your narrow beliefs (see your last sentence about "utility gained"). For some irrational reason you don't want progress to work. Well, this is clearly a problem, but one we can't do anything about right now. May be your brain is low on dopamine or something.

In any case, there is basically nothing useful that simple negativism such as expressed by yourself can bring to the discussion. "This won't work" is simply useless, especially when others have reasons to believe that it will. I can't tell you to read up, because you claim you already read enough (didn't do you much good though), but may be you can try improving your outlook on life. Ask your doctor for some anti-depressants. I've also read today that Semen can act as one. Then you might be able to consider our future prospects without your preconceived pessimism.

Hans Moravec's article When will computer hardware match the human brain? includes several charts that show computing machinery speeds from 1900 to 2000. The article asserts that machines will reach human-level processing speed by 2020. I, for one, welcome our new... Oh, never mind.

Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Hans Moravec, and many other credible thinkers put their conservative extrapolation to Singularity much earlier: About 2030.

> > But there is no inherent reason why computing power can't someday reach the
> > level of the human brain. If Moore's law continues, this is supposed to take
> > under 30 years.

> Please read this statement, and mod parent appropriately. Insightful?!? Hardly!

You seem to imply based on that statement this should be modded funny or some such. Why is that?

The procecssing power of the human brain has been a subject of science for a few decades now. We already know the human brains power is not in its overall speed but its neural net configuration and 'parallel' computational ability.

Currently 300 TeraOps for human thought capacity is the scientific estimation.
If we assume 6 ×10^10 neurons × 5 ×10^1 firings per second × 10^3 operations per neuron firing , we end up with a result of 3 ×10^15 operations per second (300 Trillion operations per second or 300 TeraOps)

Super computers of today are capable of this.
It's obviously not raw computing power that makes us special, its the configuration of the hardware (or software from a conventional computers point of view)

Quoting from: Moravec, Hans, "When will computer hardware match the human brain?," Journal of Transhumanism. 1998. Vol. 1.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

The problem with space exploration is that even if you go out to space with the most greedy intentions, the payoff is decades (asteroid mining) or centuries (terraforming) off. I'm all for it but getting capitalists to buy into it will be tough. Of course there is Microsoft with it's $40 billion nest egg.

Space exploration is really a public works project. This is a pretty interesting paper on the subject. The thing is that it ends up being a benefit to the entire human race but some the up front costs are so much, the payoff so distant and the effort so demanding, it's basically relegated to government bodies (or perhaps Bill Gates).

In 2020, your average $1000 Wal-Mart Computer will be roughly complex enough to emulate a human brain in realtime. Toss in some cognitive modelling, and you have your new plastic pal who is fun to be with.

Regulations won't don't do squat.

There's only a couple ways to prevent extinction from some nasty bio or nano-disaster (whether intentional or accidental): 1) Permanently move some eggs off our basketcase-planet; 2) Hope that benevolent AI and IA (human Intelligence Amplication) emerges before full-blown nanotech, to safely handle it better than any stupid & selfish humans could; 3) Luck.

"The Fermi Paradox refers to the question mark that hovers over the data point that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial life. This tells us that it is not the case that life evolves on a significant fraction of Earth-like planets and proceeds to develop advanced technology, using it to colonize the universe in ways that would have been detected with our current instrumentation. There must be (at least) one Great Filter â" an evolutionary step that is extremely improbable â" somewhere on the line between Earth-like planet and colonizing-in-detectable-ways civilization. If the Great Filter isn't in our past, we must fear it in our (near) future. Maybe nearly every civilization that develops a certain level of technology causes its own extinction." -- http://www.transhumanist.com/volume9/risks.html

--

There seems to be a drive to explain persons solely through their genes. Anyone who feels that way: This is a dangerous road to Nazism. The believe to be able to identify criminals by their genes before they even committed a crime, indeed before they're even born has the potential for Nazi scale horrors.

One last thing: The human genome is a few hundred MByte. The human brain's capacity is estimated in the Petabyte region. That alone should dispell the myth that the genes are everything.

I get the feeling that we're comparing apples to celery here.

Maybe you should read informative article by Hans Moravec, one of the leading figures in Robotics:

http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

"I don't think the computer industry will truly mature until 2015, 2020," he said. I don't understand where this comment fit into that article. BUT - I do not believe this at all.

Well, that is about the time that computers are scheduled to become smarter than humans:
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

Hans Moravec estimates it would take about 100 Trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. At 38 Tflops, Earth Simulator is in the ballpark. Maybe they should have called it human simulator, or just "Sim".

After reading the guidelines to the contest, I figured I'd offer the following models/design specs for those interested in participating:

• Understanding how the Brain works
• When will computer hardware match the human brain?
• How your Brain Works
• How the Human Brain Developed and How the Human Mind Works
• Theory of Sequentially Timed Learning
• If your toaster had a brain
• neuroinformatics (please don't confuse with clam-baking)
• Brain Implants Control Computers

It is worth noting that Lloyd's thought experiments in these areas were preceded by similar speculations over 4 years ago in Anders Sandberg's paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. Lloyd has extended them a bit by bringing Black Holes into the picture.

Now, what we will be able to engineer in this century, using diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, is solar system sized nested layer Dyson shell supercomputers. This is a unique architecture that I have named a Matrioshka Brain. It will allow us to most efficiently use the entire power output of the sun and compute somewhere in the range of 10^42 to 10^52 ops per second.

Interestingly enough, Michael Franks has a paper "Reversibility in optimally scalable computer architectures" which postulates a solar system sized reversible architecture that would out-compute any non-reversible architecture. This too would be using atomic-scale engineering. Unfortunately it requires the power output of an A or B class star (~50,000 suns) and requires an amount of silicon equal to the mass of Saturn (our solar system doesn't even come close to having that unless we mine the sun for it). After we have developed machines of these architectures, our development comes to a slow halt unless our ability to do sub-atomic engineering can be developed. I'll be quite happy with what we can get out of atomic-scale engineering -- it supplies enough computronium for roughly a trillion-trillion human minds for those who choose to upload.

As for whether cryonics is a scam, isn't it a bit too early to tell? After all, isn't the premise of cryonics that medical technology 50-100 years in the future will be able to repair the freezing damage? How do you know what future medicine can/cannot do?

Admittedly, I think the odds are fairly low (< 1%) that current patients will be revived with > 90% fidelity (however you define the term.) within the next 100 years. However, all existing cryonics organizations point out that they don't if or when you will be revived, if at all, nor how well your identity will be recovered. So if you sign up anyway, and you are not successfully revived, how have you been defrauded?

At worst, I see cryonics as a form of religion--instead of resurrection by God, some cryonicists expect to be revived by the benevolent nanotechnologists of the future. But I don't think that makes them scam artists or frauds.

Finally, anyone familiar with the finances of cryonics organizations will tell you that cryonics is a terrible way to make money, even assuming it is a scam. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but less than 700-800 people have signed up to be frozen in the 38 years since the Robert Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality (the first book to seriously propose cryonics.) Of those less than 100 have been frozen. Historically, most people who work for cryonics organizations are volunteers or make little money. For example, the December 1990, Cryonics magazine reported that the Board of Directors of Alcor voted a 25% pay cut for all of the staff, so they could keep their budget balanced. Many of the Directors are also on the staff. The salaries after the cut ranged from $22,500 annually for highest paid full-time employee (the President) to $14,400 for the lowest-paid full-time employee.

First of all, each element in the central nervous system contacts somewhere between 1000-10,000 other elements in the central nervous system. [The] most complex machines that we build, typically the fan out - this contact rate - is on the order of 10. A close colleague of mine, Murray Gell-Mann [Ed.: Nobel Prize winner in Theoretical Physics; Distinguished Fellow, Co-Chairman of the Science Board, Santa Fe Institute, see website], is fond of saying, "when I go three orders of magnitude, I go to a new science." So here is one "three orders of magnitude" effect here.

I think you'll end up being off by two orders of magnitude... I'm willing to bet it'll be within the next century:

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/rob ot.papers/1991/Universal.Robot .910618.html

http://www.transhumanist.com/volum e1/moravec.htm

Thoughtful discussions (rather than the usual doom and gloom predictions) regarding the consequences of genetic engineering and technological progress in computers, AI, etc. may be found in the Extropy Institute's Mailing List. There are many years of discussions in the Archives.

Some additional sources of useful information include the The Transhumanist FAQ and the Journal of Transhumanism . The World Transhumanist Association is an umbrella organization for many regional transhumanist groups.

The people involved in these organizations actively discuss and investigate the many issues and concerns related to our future evolution as a species.

Journal of Transhumanism

Extropy Institute

World Transhumanist Association

-- MotorMachineMercenary

You raise several points:

I agree that it is easiest to presume sentience in entities like ourselves. We all use this as a heuristic in everyday life: you don't subject people you meet to the Turing test before deciding they are sentient. Instead we assume because an entity looks human it has an inner life similar to our own. I also agree that it is more difficult to decide on the sentience of entities explicitly created as mimics. The experiences with Elisa, in which people ascribed complex mental characteristics to a very simple program, showed that naive individuals can be fooled.

However, just because it is harder to make a decision about the sentience of entities that are more different from you doesn't mean it is impossible. Otherwise, you would seem to be taking the position that humans (and perhaps a few other mammals) are the only entities in the entire universe that can be sentient, just because they happen to closely resemble you.

The example of wetness of a simulated ocean is a bit of a red herring. I agree that no matter how well modelled, a simulated ocean can never be wet to an operator outside the machine, nor could it ever drown her or taste salty. But the quality of thinking is different from the quality of wetness. Consider a legal brief or a computer program. For these objects it is the pattern, not the physical medium that the pattern is embeded in that is important. It does not make any sense to talk about a 'simulated' legal brief or a 'simulated' computer program - each object with the specified pattern is in some sense as good as the original, although in practice one physical embodiement may be more practical to use in a specific situation.

In the same way, the important thing about sentience is its pattern, not its physical embodiment. Even neurobiologists have only the vaugest grasp of the physical embodiement underlying our sentience, but that doesn't stop us from thinking and experiencing.

I think that the Turing test remains an excellent minimum test for sentience. I can imaging sentient entities that would not pass the Turing test, but if the test is long enough and with a good enough examiner, I don't see any way that a non-sentient entity could pass it. I would argue that the fact that no computer program has come even close to passing a Turning test is a sign of the test's strength.

It seems highly implausible to me that we will be able to create sentient, human-level intelligence any time before the hardware power of computers at least matches the hardware power of the human brain (estimated at about 1000 million MIPS, see http://www.transhumanist.com/volum e1/moravec.htm ). If Moore's law continues to hold, this amount of computer power will cost about $1000 in the 2020-2030 time frame (see figure 2 in the cited article).

You argue that because we don't know the exact basis of consciousness, we have no ability to decide whether an entity is conscious or not, and thus can't know whether it is deserving of rights or not. While an interesting philosophical position, that stance is simply not practical for living in the uncertain, messy world that we all inhabit. People make decisions on the basis of uncertain information and imperfect understandings all the time. Some of those decisions have really important consequences, like whether people get the right diagnosis and treatment and live, or die when they have an illness (doctors); whether people get deprived of many of their rights and go to jail (judges, juries); and even what legal rights you have in the first place (legislators, the electorate at large).

It would be nice if we had ways of removing that uncertainty from life, but we don't. So I see no reason why a similar level of uncertainty presents any barrier to the practical decision about whether an AI is conscious or not.