Artificial Intelligence

[The Grand Nudger]

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I assumed the hypothetical, obviously - and while we may not have built a thinking machine yet - those machines we have built are, in each and every case, better than their biological counterparts at what we want them to do.  You don't ride a horse to work, you don't fly across the ocean on an albatross, and the internet isn't a room full of chinese people.  Life brute forces solutions, we engineer them.  It's a mismatch on a fundamental level, and it;ls why we're the dominant species on this planet.  Evolution is incapable of providing life with iterative "designs" as quickly or as task specific as we've been coming up with them.  Trees have all the incentive in the world to grow steel spikes in their trunks...they simply can't - but I can put them there.

We could pinch metabolic pennies by losing structures, or scaling them back, but that's no guarantee that we will, and obviously we haven't done so in this regard yet.  You're applying costs as a proscriptive, stretching the concept too far.  That our brains could be smaller and provide the same effect is -well- observed, and yet the big brain remains in the same way that our fingernails remain.  It's going to take more than a cost in a vacuum to move that bar, or it already would have moved.  It's going to take a situation that directly affects our reproductive ability, because that's the only metric that counts in this particular game.  The metabolic cost of a brain might be one of those factors in a specific situation, but it isn't, by itself, capable of making the change we're invoking...or, again, it already would have.  


I still can't get onboard with you, regarding your idea of trickery.  Seems to me that you've painted yourself into a corner over method rather than effect.  It's effect, after all, that allows you to determine that I'm intelligent.  You don't know -how- I generate anger, so it can't be method.  You have an idea that human beings generate thought (in this case anger) a certain way, but since we understand that there is more than one road to damascus (both birds and planes fly just as structures without neural architectures present effects ascribed to intelligence), that can't actually matter all that much, or, if it does, and you would demand that AI generate thought in the manner that -we- do...you're actually talking about creating artificial human intelligence, not artificial intelligence capable of operating at a level -on par- with human intelligence. In that sense, it -would- be trickery, you're looking for a human intelligence where there is no human being, and if people claim to have created -that-....they're charlatans, obviously - and I agree wholeheartedly that that shit is bogus..lol. I'm not sure If I'm misunderstanding your response, or you misunderstood the question I asked. It may be that we won't be able to bring each other eye to eye on this one. I'd call a plant intelligent, and even conscious.

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I dumped the above response to your previous posts in tags because it;s a bit of a tangent - and doesn't really require us to see eye to eye to discuss AI, or it's feasibility.

Let me see if I can rephrase the point I'm trying to express, based in good part on agreement rather than disagreement with what I understand to be your position.

-We need more processing power than we currently possess to achieve the sort of AI you're discussing, and moores law will only get us so far-. This is a fair summary of your main point, which we began discussing as it relates to AI, yes?

:Agreed entirely: One of the areas that biology, imo, has had a leg up in this regard is scale, brains are dense boards (I think I can float this one between you and I without too much trouble). Moores law may not yield an architecture of commensurate scale, density, or "count" (again, floating it between us) within a reasonable timeframe, if ever. However, we -know- for a fact that we don't need a 1 for 1 measure (nueral to digital, just as one example), because human beings can function, a human level of intelligence can manifest itself in us, with a -vast- reduction in the scale of our brains, the density of our "boards". The total count of nuerons. That means moores doesn't have to give us an architecture commensurate with a human brain to achieve a human level of intelligence, assuming there's a relationship here. I'm accepting the bar, in a hypothetical AI scenario, whereby we create a machine as a sort of mechanical simulation of a human brain, and accepting in that scenario that if we were to do so it could possess intelligence commensurate -to- a human being. I'm suggesting that whatever that number "x" is, it's a hell of alot lower than the total number of "x" we currently possess in our brains.

Does that help to clarify?

Regarding the shortfall between what we now possess in computing and that number "x", I couldn't help but see a big source of as yet untapped power on the chem side of our electrochem brains (continuing with the theme of the human brain and life in general as a rough working model for how we might create a machine intelligence). Even in the absence of neural architectures chemical computing appears to be able to provide effects generally considered to be indicative of consciousness and intelligence, though nowhere near what we present in it's totality, obvs. Que the masters of organic chemistry with half a billion years of dev -already- behind them, eh?