Funny. Look in the mirror when you say this out loud.
If "the most primitive animals" were to lack part of the brain, it would much more likely be a cerebrum, or at least a large one. One of the things that's different about humans is the massively increased size of the cerebrum -- supposedly giving us the ability to reason and whatnot.
Wow. Posting anonymously to make a derogatory, know-it-all and yet, ill-informed comment, eh? The fact remains that invertebrates and some lower vertebrates (e.g., salamanders) have no cerebellum (look it up on Google, it's not that hard). Besides, a cerebellum makes no sense without a cerebrum. It is precisely because the cerebellum appeared in more advanced animals that they are more advanced. In other words, the cerebellum gives them the ability to spend more time to focus on important things in their environment and that ability increases their chance of survival.
As for the reason why people with cerebellar lesions may sometimes speak in a halting manner, it's not because of anything wrong with Broca's area (in the inferior frontal lobe of the cerebrum)
But who said otherwise? Fighting with your own strawman, eh? I can't believe someone actually modded you up.
I agree with the author (Walter Kirn) of the article. Multitasking is so time consuming that the brain relies on the cerebellum (little brain) to handle a lot of routine tasks (maintaining posture, walking, standing, blinking, etc...) while the conscious cognitive areas of the cerebral cortex focus on an important task (e.g., talking, thinking, reasoning, planning, etc...). People with cerebellar lesions are known to speak in a halting stacatto-like manner. The reason is that Broca's area (the part of the brain that produces speech) is constantly being interrupted because the brain's motor cortex has to momentarily stop what it's focusing on in order to attend to the routine tasks that a healthy cerebellum would handle automatically. So multitasking is such a big problem that the cerebellum contains more neurons than all the other areas of the brain combined but it cannot do everything because it's a direct sensori-motor automaton. That is to say, it cannot plan or predict phenomena, so it is limited. Only the most primitive animals lack a cerebellum.
Why not the heat differential between deep ocean water and surface water? Or heat from either coal or nuclear or geothermal power plants? The possibilities are endless. Assuming it works as advertised, of course.
If all of this is automated, how will a person, for instance....get their boat on the trailer from home, to the lake to drop it into the water...and back?
All problems have solutions. I'm sure you could summons a truck that would take you and the boat to the water. At that point, a paid human attendant would actually maneuver the truck in position to place the boat into the water. Or you could have a license to do that yourself. The point of self-driving vehicles is to eliminate human drivers from the road so as to eliminate accidents. There are over 40,000 traffic fatalities in the US every year. So the market is crying out for this technology.
Remember that one of the things that this technology would do is put a lot of drivers out of work. Some could be employed to do things that the vehicles cannot do themselves. That is, until truly intelligent humanoid-type robots become a reality. Massive unemployment due to AI automation is a huge problem that governments will have to tackle sooner or later. Current economic systems (both communism and capitalism) are inadequate because they are all based on human labor. I foresee a very bumpy road ahead. But that's a different issue.
The only way I would trust this with my life is if EVERY car was controlled.
I agree. The advent of automated transportation is an oppostunity for big cities to ban all private vehicles altogether. Cities should purchase a whole fleet of self-driving vehicles, depending on their needs, and park them on the streets. City dwellers and visitors would then be given a wireless, GPS-enabled beeper to summons a vehicle when needed, at which time the nearest free vehicle would drive itself to the customer's location and take them to their destination. Car-pooling could be enforced, if necessary. There are already way too many cars as it is. Most of them are sitting idle at any given time. So, in that sense, self-driving vehicles may not be a good thing for the car manufacturers because it may lead to a drastic reduction in demand if a lot of congested cities adopt this plan.
If "the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation", then this virtual reality must have been created somewhere, let's call it "the real universe".. but wait, what if that real universe is just a virtual reality simulation.. and on and on and on..
Yeah, that's the problem with these sorts of speculation. After all is said and done, they explain absolutely nothing about reality. Adding layers ad infinitum gets kind of boring and pointless, real fast.
This thing will sell like hotcakes if they can deliver on the promises.
Yeah, I want one too. Note that Mitsubishi is coming out with a laser projection TV based on this technology at CES, this month. By the way, Novalux is the company behind the technology. There's going to be both rear and front projection systems. And theater versions too. IMO, this is gonna be the end of LCD and plasma, and everything else. The next IPhone will have it, you can bet on it.
It had to happen eventually. IT has become middle-aged, mass-market, everyday stuff.
Yeah. That's the real problem, in my opinion. The computer industry is dominated by a bunch of aged computer academics who haven't had a really innovative thought since Charles Babbage designed the analytical engine 150 years ago:-). It's sad. Now that the industry is taking its first painful steps away from Babbage's serial paradigm toward massive parallelism, the old school insists on using failed ideas like multi-threading as the solution. What the computer industry needs is to retire all of their so-called "corporate fellows" and inject fresh new blood into research. The first company to crack the parallel programming nut will dominate computing in this century, you can bet on it. Microsoft and Intel know this and they are spending a shitload of money on it. Unfortunately for them, the old geeks are still in charge. Too bad. A little known startup is bound to come from left field and steal the pot of gold. ahahaha...
Interestingly, MOBE2001 makes a number of scientific testable predictions based on his bible code theories, predictions which may some day be either confirmed or refuted.
Well, thanks for pointing this out. I make no apologies to anybody about my work. If my religious convictions bother you, just ignore it, that's all. In particular, I make a scientific prediction about the human cerebellum that should be very easy to falsify, if you're a neurobiologist. In addition, I suggest a simple experiment at the bottom of the page that almost anybody can perform. Check it out.
People have been dreaming of an abstract, reduced and simplified theory of the human brain since the study of the nervous system started. Nobody has quite managed yet... why don't you try?:)
I am and I have. I have been working on just such a project for years on my own time and my own dime. Trying to use computers to simulate neurons in all their biological glory is a pipe dream. We know how several types of neurons work on a higher and simpler level: they send and receive spikes via synapses. That's the only level that needs to be simulated to achieve intelligence. The brain is a discrete temporal mechanism that uses multiple integrated networks to learn and adapt. I'm sure Markram et al are aware of this but being biologists, they can't seem to move beyond the low-level complexities.
What we need first is an overall theory to play with, not supercomputers. Once we have a theory in place, we'll have a model to experiment with (even on a small scale), something that can evolve over time. It does not have to do much (learning to walk and navigate from scratch would do fine), as long as it it can learn and adapt and it is provably scalable. If you can show that, governments and corporations will step all over themselves to give you a parallel computer as big as the island of Manhattan, if necessary.
Markram is banking on Moore's law holding steady, as a computer with the power of the human brain, using today's technology, would take up several football pitches and run up an electricity bill of $3bn a year. But by the time Markram gets around to mimicking a full human brain, computing will have moved on.
It's amazing how some people want the computing resources to simulate a rat's brain but still can't simulate a honeybee's brain and the resultant behavioral complexity. After all, a bee's brain has only about a million neurons. It could probably be done on a desktop machine and yet, a bee's behavior is amazingly sophisticated. Is it me or does it seem that some people have no clue as to what constitutes intelligence and would rather spend the taxpayer's money on what can only be qualified as useless goals?
Would it not be much better to implement a downsized version of the human brain (with all the various cortices) and see if it can learn and adapt to the environment? But then again, that would be too much to ask since Markram et al don't have an overall theory of brain operation. It's better to keep your sights as high as possible and have an excuse as to why your artificial brain or cortical column is no more intelligent than a flea: you always need faster and more expensive computers. And more funding. Yeah.
I've been saying this for years. Changing time is an oxymoron. Time dilation is an oxymoron. It's not time that slows down, it's the clock. In fact, nothing can move in spacetime at all, by definition. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper (of falsification fame) called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". In other words, all that nonsense about bodies following their geodesics through spacetime and about time travel through wormholes is all crap. Sorry. ahahaha...
I mostly pay attention to theoretical areas like programming languages and automated reasoning, and MS has made significant contributions in those fields over the last few years.
Yeah, and not only that, Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century. Lately, they have hired a few world-renowned experts in parallel programming and supercomjputing. Dan Reed (formerly of the Rennaissance Computing Institute) comes to mind. However, I doubt that this is going to be enough to solve the parallel computing conundrum. Sadly, computer science is dominated by a bunch of aging computer geeks who still think like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming and CPU design. Solving the parallel computing problem will take a strong willingness to break away from the orthodox fold. In my opinion, it is time to declare the algorithm dead and embrace a non-algorithmic computing model. We must reinvent the computer, especially now that the industry is taking its first painful step away from sequential computing to massive parallelism. We made a mistake fifty years ago when we chose Babbage's model but, it wasn't so bad because most of our computers had single-core CPUs. Unless we choose the correct path now, we will pay a heavy price later. Eventually, we will be forced to change. Better now than later. Is there anybody at Microsoft who can see the writing on the wall? Who know?
Threads are the second worse thing to have happened to computing, in my opinion. They make the problem worse. Ask Intel and Microsoft. They've been trying to make threads works for years and they've spent a lot of money on it. They have nothing interesting to show for their effort. What's amazing to me is that we've had the answer to parallel programming with us all along. We are just blind to it, for whatever psycho-social reason. We've been using it to parallelize processes in such applications as cellular automata, simulations, neural networks for decades. And without using threads, mind you. We just need to apply the same principle at the instruction level and design development tools and special multicore CPUs to support the model. Read Half a Century of Crappy Computing to find out more.
The reason that parallel programming is so hard is that we're still using the same computing model that English mathematician Charles Babbage pioneered 150 years ago. It's time to change. To understand the problem, read, Parallel Programming, Math, and the Curse of the Algorithm.
I don't trust Microsoft running software on my computer and to be honest, after what happened with China, I don't trust Google to store my information online.
Don't matter. The writing is on the wall and Microsoft is scared to death. In the future, all you will need is a good browser and the web. I even envision the coming of cheap, super-thin, throw-away, wireless browser-pads that you can buy from an automatic dispenser at the airport or at 7-11. The future, you can't escape it.
This post is both in the state of being the first and not the first post until I hit the submit button and decide the outcome by refreshing the page. That's quantum computing.
Yeah. That's quantum computing alright, 100% bullshit. Now you idiots can mod me down as a troll but it's still bullshit. ahahaha...
quantum computing is not just feasible, but is already happening as we speak in labs the world over, like the one in TFA.
Don't you believe it. It's all lies and bullshit. They've been making progress announcements every few weeks or so for the longest. Nothing worthwhile has or will ever come out of it. It's a way for them to keep the money flowing in. And who's paying for it? We, the public, are paying for it. It's time that we, the public, have a say as to what is being done with our money. Are you listening, NIST? If you are invloved in this fraud you believe that I'm slandering you in any way, let's take it to court. Have your lawyer contact my lawyer. ahahaha... Come to think of it, maybe I should call my lawyer and ask him about filing a class action suit. ahahaha...
Yeah. Quantum computing is both crackpottery and a fraud. Any technology that is based on the idea that a cat can be both alive and dead simultaneously is obviously voodoo science. Those QC fraudsters, especially that Oxford crackpot, David Deutsch (of zillions of parallel universes fame), don't even know why nature is probabilistic and yet they feel free to postulate all sorts of voodoo crap. As Feyrabend once said, "The most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence". Laughable indeed. ahahaha...
I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...
I think the first thing you need to do is remove the incredibly arrogant tone from your blog, especially seeing as a very large portion of it is really quite questionable. It makes you seem like an absolute raving lunatic.
One of the things I noticed about a lot of computer geeks is their total lack of a sense of humor. It smacks of autism and anal retentiveness. ahahaha...
The next step, if I may hazard a guess, would probably be testing to see if it can maintain it's balance while walking along uneven surfaces, stairs, sharp inclines, etc.
So this is how we are going to achieve ful human-level intelligence? One step at a time? ahahaha... This is like emptying the ocean with a pail. Woudn't it be more sensible to write AI software that can, all by itself, learn how to crawl, balance, walk, and eventually stay standing after a shove? Kinda like the way humans do it? That would be infinitely more impressive, IMO.
AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel defined the current market and AMD cannot beat them at their own game. They are condemned to always play second fiddle unless they can find a way to redefine the market or carve a new market that will supersede the old one. They can only do so by reassessing the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and correct what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it. I call it The Age of Crappy Concurrency.
Now that the industry is transitioning to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of a lifetime to change the computing landscape in its favor and leave Intel and everybody else in the dust. See also AMD Can Kick Intel's Ass and Half a Century of Crappy Computing.
Yeah. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. IP laws are like swords that modern tech companies (Apple included) use to beat the rest of us into submission while they corner a market and reap mostly undeserved and exhorbitant profits. MSDOS was not worth billions of dollars, sorry. Whosoever uses the sword shall perish by the sword. In the end, IP laws will lead to violent wars, if they haven't already.
Slashdot Mirror
You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Funny. Look in the mirror when you say this out loud.
If "the most primitive animals" were to lack part of the brain, it would much more likely be a cerebrum, or at least a large one. One of the things that's different about humans is the massively increased size of the cerebrum -- supposedly giving us the ability to reason and whatnot.
Wow. Posting anonymously to make a derogatory, know-it-all and yet, ill-informed comment, eh? The fact remains that invertebrates and some lower vertebrates (e.g., salamanders) have no cerebellum (look it up on Google, it's not that hard). Besides, a cerebellum makes no sense without a cerebrum. It is precisely because the cerebellum appeared in more advanced animals that they are more advanced. In other words, the cerebellum gives them the ability to spend more time to focus on important things in their environment and that ability increases their chance of survival.
As for the reason why people with cerebellar lesions may sometimes speak in a halting manner, it's not because of anything wrong with Broca's area (in the inferior frontal lobe of the cerebrum)
But who said otherwise? Fighting with your own strawman, eh? I can't believe someone actually modded you up.
I agree with the author (Walter Kirn) of the article. Multitasking is so time consuming that the brain relies on the cerebellum (little brain) to handle a lot of routine tasks (maintaining posture, walking, standing, blinking, etc...) while the conscious cognitive areas of the cerebral cortex focus on an important task (e.g., talking, thinking, reasoning, planning, etc...). People with cerebellar lesions are known to speak in a halting stacatto-like manner. The reason is that Broca's area (the part of the brain that produces speech) is constantly being interrupted because the brain's motor cortex has to momentarily stop what it's focusing on in order to attend to the routine tasks that a healthy cerebellum would handle automatically. So multitasking is such a big problem that the cerebellum contains more neurons than all the other areas of the brain combined but it cannot do everything because it's a direct sensori-motor automaton. That is to say, it cannot plan or predict phenomena, so it is limited. Only the most primitive animals lack a cerebellum.
As a programmer, I'm most excited by the possibility of a new platform and the programming jobs that will be created by it.
And who's going to debug all the billions of self-reproducing monsters you unleash into the world, pray tell?
Why not the heat differential between deep ocean water and surface water? Or heat from either coal or nuclear or geothermal power plants? The possibilities are endless. Assuming it works as advertised, of course.
Remember that one of the things that this technology would do is put a lot of drivers out of work. Some could be employed to do things that the vehicles cannot do themselves. That is, until truly intelligent humanoid-type robots become a reality. Massive unemployment due to AI automation is a huge problem that governments will have to tackle sooner or later. Current economic systems (both communism and capitalism) are inadequate because they are all based on human labor. I foresee a very bumpy road ahead. But that's a different issue.
I agree. The advent of automated transportation is an oppostunity for big cities to ban all private vehicles altogether. Cities should purchase a whole fleet of self-driving vehicles, depending on their needs, and park them on the streets. City dwellers and visitors would then be given a wireless, GPS-enabled beeper to summons a vehicle when needed, at which time the nearest free vehicle would drive itself to the customer's location and take them to their destination. Car-pooling could be enforced, if necessary. There are already way too many cars as it is. Most of them are sitting idle at any given time. So, in that sense, self-driving vehicles may not be a good thing for the car manufacturers because it may lead to a drastic reduction in demand if a lot of congested cities adopt this plan.
If "the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation", then this virtual reality must have been created somewhere, let's call it "the real universe".. but wait, what if that real universe is just a virtual reality simulation.. and on and on and on..
Yeah, that's the problem with these sorts of speculation. After all is said and done, they explain absolutely nothing about reality. Adding layers ad infinitum gets kind of boring and pointless, real fast.
This thing will sell like hotcakes if they can deliver on the promises.
Yeah, I want one too. Note that Mitsubishi is coming out with a laser projection TV based on this technology at CES, this month. By the way, Novalux is the company behind the technology. There's going to be both rear and front projection systems. And theater versions too. IMO, this is gonna be the end of LCD and plasma, and everything else. The next IPhone will have it, you can bet on it.
It had to happen eventually. IT has become middle-aged, mass-market, everyday stuff.
:-). It's sad. Now that the industry is taking its first painful steps away from Babbage's serial paradigm toward massive parallelism, the old school insists on using failed ideas like multi-threading as the solution. What the computer industry needs is to retire all of their so-called "corporate fellows" and inject fresh new blood into research. The first company to crack the parallel programming nut will dominate computing in this century, you can bet on it. Microsoft and Intel know this and they are spending a shitload of money on it. Unfortunately for them, the old geeks are still in charge. Too bad. A little known startup is bound to come from left field and steal the pot of gold. ahahaha...
Yeah. That's the real problem, in my opinion. The computer industry is dominated by a bunch of aged computer academics who haven't had a really innovative thought since Charles Babbage designed the analytical engine 150 years ago
Interestingly, MOBE2001 makes a number of scientific testable predictions based on his bible code theories, predictions which may some day be either confirmed or refuted.
Well, thanks for pointing this out. I make no apologies to anybody about my work. If my religious convictions bother you, just ignore it, that's all. In particular, I make a scientific prediction about the human cerebellum that should be very easy to falsify, if you're a neurobiologist. In addition, I suggest a simple experiment at the bottom of the page that almost anybody can perform. Check it out.
People have been dreaming of an abstract, reduced and simplified theory of the human brain since the study of the nervous system started. Nobody has quite managed yet... why don't you try? :)
I am and I have. I have been working on just such a project for years on my own time and my own dime. Trying to use computers to simulate neurons in all their biological glory is a pipe dream. We know how several types of neurons work on a higher and simpler level: they send and receive spikes via synapses. That's the only level that needs to be simulated to achieve intelligence. The brain is a discrete temporal mechanism that uses multiple integrated networks to learn and adapt. I'm sure Markram et al are aware of this but being biologists, they can't seem to move beyond the low-level complexities.
What we need first is an overall theory to play with, not supercomputers. Once we have a theory in place, we'll have a model to experiment with (even on a small scale), something that can evolve over time. It does not have to do much (learning to walk and navigate from scratch would do fine), as long as it it can learn and adapt and it is provably scalable. If you can show that, governments and corporations will step all over themselves to give you a parallel computer as big as the island of Manhattan, if necessary.
It's amazing how some people want the computing resources to simulate a rat's brain but still can't simulate a honeybee's brain and the resultant behavioral complexity. After all, a bee's brain has only about a million neurons. It could probably be done on a desktop machine and yet, a bee's behavior is amazingly sophisticated. Is it me or does it seem that some people have no clue as to what constitutes intelligence and would rather spend the taxpayer's money on what can only be qualified as useless goals?
Would it not be much better to implement a downsized version of the human brain (with all the various cortices) and see if it can learn and adapt to the environment? But then again, that would be too much to ask since Markram et al don't have an overall theory of brain operation. It's better to keep your sights as high as possible and have an excuse as to why your artificial brain or cortical column is no more intelligent than a flea: you always need faster and more expensive computers. And more funding. Yeah.
I've been saying this for years. Changing time is an oxymoron. Time dilation is an oxymoron. It's not time that slows down, it's the clock. In fact, nothing can move in spacetime at all, by definition. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper (of falsification fame) called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". In other words, all that nonsense about bodies following their geodesics through spacetime and about time travel through wormholes is all crap. Sorry. ahahaha...
I mostly pay attention to theoretical areas like programming languages and automated reasoning, and MS has made significant contributions in those fields over the last few years.
Yeah, and not only that, Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century. Lately, they have hired a few world-renowned experts in parallel programming and supercomjputing. Dan Reed (formerly of the Rennaissance Computing Institute) comes to mind. However, I doubt that this is going to be enough to solve the parallel computing conundrum. Sadly, computer science is dominated by a bunch of aging computer geeks who still think like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming and CPU design. Solving the parallel computing problem will take a strong willingness to break away from the orthodox fold. In my opinion, it is time to declare the algorithm dead and embrace a non-algorithmic computing model. We must reinvent the computer, especially now that the industry is taking its first painful step away from sequential computing to massive parallelism. We made a mistake fifty years ago when we chose Babbage's model but, it wasn't so bad because most of our computers had single-core CPUs. Unless we choose the correct path now, we will pay a heavy price later. Eventually, we will be forced to change. Better now than later. Is there anybody at Microsoft who can see the writing on the wall? Who know?
Threads are the second worse thing to have happened to computing, in my opinion. They make the problem worse. Ask Intel and Microsoft. They've been trying to make threads works for years and they've spent a lot of money on it. They have nothing interesting to show for their effort. What's amazing to me is that we've had the answer to parallel programming with us all along. We are just blind to it, for whatever psycho-social reason. We've been using it to parallelize processes in such applications as cellular automata, simulations, neural networks for decades. And without using threads, mind you. We just need to apply the same principle at the instruction level and design development tools and special multicore CPUs to support the model. Read Half a Century of Crappy Computing to find out more.
The reason that parallel programming is so hard is that we're still using the same computing model that English mathematician Charles Babbage pioneered 150 years ago. It's time to change. To understand the problem, read, Parallel Programming, Math, and the Curse of the Algorithm.
I don't trust Microsoft running software on my computer and to be honest, after what happened with China, I don't trust Google to store my information online.
Don't matter. The writing is on the wall and Microsoft is scared to death. In the future, all you will need is a good browser and the web. I even envision the coming of cheap, super-thin, throw-away, wireless browser-pads that you can buy from an automatic dispenser at the airport or at 7-11. The future, you can't escape it.
This post is both in the state of being the first and not the first post until I hit the submit button and decide the outcome by refreshing the page. That's quantum computing.
Yeah. That's quantum computing alright, 100% bullshit. Now you idiots can mod me down as a troll but it's still bullshit. ahahaha...
quantum computing is not just feasible, but is already happening as we speak in labs the world over, like the one in TFA.
Don't you believe it. It's all lies and bullshit. They've been making progress announcements every few weeks or so for the longest. Nothing worthwhile has or will ever come out of it. It's a way for them to keep the money flowing in. And who's paying for it? We, the public, are paying for it. It's time that we, the public, have a say as to what is being done with our money. Are you listening, NIST? If you are invloved in this fraud you believe that I'm slandering you in any way, let's take it to court. Have your lawyer contact my lawyer. ahahaha... Come to think of it, maybe I should call my lawyer and ask him about filing a class action suit. ahahaha...
Yeah. Quantum computing is both crackpottery and a fraud. Any technology that is based on the idea that a cat can be both alive and dead simultaneously is obviously voodoo science. Those QC fraudsters, especially that Oxford crackpot, David Deutsch (of zillions of parallel universes fame), don't even know why nature is probabilistic and yet they feel free to postulate all sorts of voodoo crap. As Feyrabend once said, "The most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence". Laughable indeed. ahahaha...
I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...
I think the first thing you need to do is remove the incredibly arrogant tone from your blog, especially seeing as a very large portion of it is really quite questionable. It makes you seem like an absolute raving lunatic.
One of the things I noticed about a lot of computer geeks is their total lack of a sense of humor. It smacks of autism and anal retentiveness. ahahaha...
The next step, if I may hazard a guess, would probably be testing to see if it can maintain it's balance while walking along uneven surfaces, stairs, sharp inclines, etc.
So this is how we are going to achieve ful human-level intelligence? One step at a time? ahahaha... This is like emptying the ocean with a pail. Woudn't it be more sensible to write AI software that can, all by itself, learn how to crawl, balance, walk, and eventually stay standing after a shove? Kinda like the way humans do it? That would be infinitely more impressive, IMO.
AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel defined the current market and AMD cannot beat them at their own game. They are condemned to always play second fiddle unless they can find a way to redefine the market or carve a new market that will supersede the old one. They can only do so by reassessing the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and correct what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it. I call it The Age of Crappy Concurrency.
Now that the industry is transitioning to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of a lifetime to change the computing landscape in its favor and leave Intel and everybody else in the dust. See also AMD Can Kick Intel's Ass and Half a Century of Crappy Computing.
LOL PATENTS RULE LOL
Yeah. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. IP laws are like swords that modern tech companies (Apple included) use to beat the rest of us into submission while they corner a market and reap mostly undeserved and exhorbitant profits. MSDOS was not worth billions of dollars, sorry. Whosoever uses the sword shall perish by the sword. In the end, IP laws will lead to violent wars, if they haven't already.