Shannon and the brain..

You think AI will always be 20 years away, and I think it will always be 10 years away. That makes me more optimistic.

John

Why? It's a matter of scaling up what already runs.

Let "what already runs" translate War and Peace from the original Russian. Let it take as long as it needs to do the first chapter.

John

What we can't accomplish in 20 years is virtually unlimited, but there's a shorter list of things we can't do in a ten year time span.

I believe the list of things you can't do in ten years is longer than the list of things you can't do in 20.

-- Les Cargill

..

How on earth woud "folds" constitute storage?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Spehro Pefhany:

Nonsense: the first is a subset of the latter.

we are talking whole brain simulation at the neural level

John Larkin:

First of all the network must learn a lot about the world, otherwise it would not be able to translate "time flies like an arrow" or "there's a man in the room with a green beret". It will take years, like a baby, that despite being able to learn 10 new words each day, needs at least two years to be able to speak decently.

Remember HAL's last words: "I am HAL9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1991. My first instructor was Mr. Arkany. He taught me to sing a song...

and another few to learn to speak indecently..

Spehro Pefhany:

Still quoting movies: "You talking to me? You talking to me? Well, I'm the only one here..." ;-)

Well. That explains everything.

John

Well, that's the wonderful thing about the future...

John

Even ten years is a long time to wait to say "told ya so!"

John

Cargo cult science. Nobody knows how memories are stored in the brain. Gross analogous behavior like "dreaming" is meaningless.

Do worms dream?

How are images and sounds stored in the brain? Where and how is my social security number stored? Is it distributed? In one place? RAID? Holographic? If one neuron dies, do I lose all of it, one digit of it, none of it? Please go into detail.

John

Nor does anybody know if a NN works anything like the brain. A NN is sort of a parody of certain gross behavior of neurons. Behavior which, as the original post points out, can't explain the brain's capacity.

Nobody understands much about how DNA works, otherwise we'd have a cure for AIDS and most other diseases. Nobody understands how the brain works. If we did, we could design, not just stumble across, useful interventions. It may take hundreds of years before we have decent, practically usable, understandings of these things.

Some gross interventions, like drugs and electroshock, do help some problems. But they are not based on any fundamantal understanding of how the brain works at the molecular or structural level.

John

There are probably other, more algorithmic, ways to do that.

One problem with NNs is that, since they are trained but not understood, there's no way to know how reliable they may be. Corner cases may produce unpredictable results.

John

That it belongs to China?

Where do you get all this crap? Have you ever heard of this, for example:

"DeMarse experimental "brain" interacts with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a specially designed plate called a multi-electrode array and a common desktop computer.

"It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom," DeMarse said. "Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network ? a brain."

The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said. "