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Building Brainlike Computers
newtronic clues us to an article in IEEE Spectrum by Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing), titled Why can't a computer be more like a brain? Hawkins brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta. He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), which is a platform for simulating neocortical activity. Programming HTMs is different — you essentially feed them sensory data. Numenta has created a framework and tools, free in a "research release," that allow anyone to build and program HTMs.
Because it would signal the end of civilization...if computers can look like women (porn), feel like women (Realdolls), and think like women (have a brain, at least in some cases), then all procreation would cease and humans would suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.
This quote from the article is telling: HTM is not a model of a full brain or even the entire neo-cortex. Our system doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind. Indeed, we do not even want to make machines that are humanlike. Rather, we want to exploit a mechanism that we believe to underlie much of human thought and perception. This operating principle can be applied to many problems of pattern recognition, pattern discovery, prediction and, ultimately, robotics. But striving to build machines that pass the Turing Test is not our mission. Well, my goal is to build machines that pass the Turing Test, so I have to think about more than cortex. But more generally, one might wonder how much of intelligence it is possible to capture with a system that "doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind".
Medievals didn't understand the atom or crystalline structures, but they still made carbonized steel for armour. They had the wrong ideas about exactly how metal became properly carbonized and tempered, but they still came up with correctly tempered spring-like steels (IIRC similar to tempered 1050) without getting any of the "why" of it right.
I think someday we will be viewed as the medievals of AI. We occasionally make progress even though we really don't know what we're doing. Yet.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
Regardless of there being a God, brains, humans, birds, or diamonds, to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
Human brains can do amazing things, but one thing we like about computers over human brains is that human brains, even the best ones, are simply wrong from time to time, and our goal with "brainlike computers" is not to recreate these mistakes, but rather to overcome them.
With respect to our senses, again, they are amazing, but then again they are fooled much of the time. There are perceptual errors, optical illusions, selective memories (ask 10 eye witnesses and get 10 different accounts), and all of that.
Today, computers are great at being calculators, and for storing and retrieving digital data. They suck at making "decisions". Even seemingly trivial ones like telling the difference between an apple and an orange is difficult for a computer today.
Take a look at much more mature technologies, like flying. For ages, humans tried to make flying machines like birds, and now we have a handful of flying technologies that can fly faster than the speed of sound and can go beyond the earth's atmosphere. But we still can't fly like a bird with flapping wings, and I don't remember a time in my life where I saw a headline saying "Building Birdlike Planes".
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.