Are you kidding me? What is the motivation behind a comment like that? This isn't about building more brains, this is about acquiring knowledge. An experiment like this brings us one step closer to a comprehensive understanding of the human brain, and knowledge like that has practically limitless potential. And even if you ignore all of the potential practical applications of being able to reverse-engineer the human brain, the bigger question it helps to answer is: What exactly does it mean to be human? That's a question that I would give almost anything to have answered in my lifetime.
He's not saying that raw processing power alone is going to lead to functional AI. I think the theory is that when complex things like abstract reasoning are broken down to their most basic level, we'll see that they're composed of very simple operations that are combined together in very complex ways. And once we unweave and understand the complexity of the combinations, then it's just a matter of having the the technology to recreate it effectively. One of the central themes of Kurtzweil's observations is that we're at a point where technological advancement (as well as advancement of knowledge as a whole) is happening at a much faster rate than at previous points in human history. So when you combine the current pace of progress with the expected acceleration of it, it's reasonable to assume that we'll have the intimate knowledge of the brain right around the same time that we'll have the raw processing power to recreate it. And once that happens, humanity is no longer limited by biology, so all bets are off as to what the future is going to look like.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding me? What is the motivation behind a comment like that? This isn't about building more brains, this is about acquiring knowledge. An experiment like this brings us one step closer to a comprehensive understanding of the human brain, and knowledge like that has practically limitless potential. And even if you ignore all of the potential practical applications of being able to reverse-engineer the human brain, the bigger question it helps to answer is: What exactly does it mean to be human? That's a question that I would give almost anything to have answered in my lifetime.
He's not saying that raw processing power alone is going to lead to functional AI. I think the theory is that when complex things like abstract reasoning are broken down to their most basic level, we'll see that they're composed of very simple operations that are combined together in very complex ways. And once we unweave and understand the complexity of the combinations, then it's just a matter of having the the technology to recreate it effectively. One of the central themes of Kurtzweil's observations is that we're at a point where technological advancement (as well as advancement of knowledge as a whole) is happening at a much faster rate than at previous points in human history. So when you combine the current pace of progress with the expected acceleration of it, it's reasonable to assume that we'll have the intimate knowledge of the brain right around the same time that we'll have the raw processing power to recreate it. And once that happens, humanity is no longer limited by biology, so all bets are off as to what the future is going to look like.