Kmguru has stated that he can’t see uploading taking place for perhaps another 150 years. I think it will occur much much sooner than that, within then next 20 possibly but certainly within the next 50.

The first step is to create the machinery that has at least the same processing power of the human brain. When we can do that and push that technology beyond human intelligence then surely the problems of uploading will be resolved at a rapidly increasing non linear rate.

Human processing power equivalence by 2012.

Moore’s law says that computing power approximately doubles every 18 months. This has held up almost perfectly since 1940.

A human neuron fires at around 200 times a second (200Hz), and there are 100 billion of them in the human brain operating in parallel. A powerful PC at present can operate at 2GHz, or the equivalent of 10 million neurons. That means we would have to link 10,000 PCs together to achieve human brain equivalence. Well we can’t quite do that yet. But in 10 years we should have a computing chip of around 200GHz, and at that point we only have to couple 100 of them together to achieve human brainpower. And that we can easily achieve, i.e. by 2012 we will have computing power to rival the human brain.

The Software.

But computing power alone will not be enough; we also need the software. And that should also not be a problem. As CPUs have become increasingly powerful recently we have seen a corresponding increase in the interest in AI software. The best approach, I still believe, is to emulate the neural networks of the human brain, and that is actively being pursued.

A few years ago it was difficult to find any books on AI in regular bookstores. Several weeks ago I checked again (9/2002), and not only are there more books there was a whole rack dedicated to AI.

It seems inevitable that human equivalent machine intelligence will be with us within the next 10 to 20 years. Assuming their intelligence is based on human neural networks then it seems very likely that they will be self-aware and our equals.

And Beyond.

But technology will not be standing still. If Moore’s law continues to hold then within a further two years their intelligence will be double that of humans. And at that point we have no way to imagine what will happen next. The emergence of super-intelligence means humans will cease to be the dominant intelligence on the planet.

Cris

The brain processes different types of information simultaneously from the various senses; images from the eyes, sounds from the ears, etc. How would you incorporate these functions into an AI platform and would you expect this advent of technologies adding to your time-lines ?

I would think that the processing of images alone would be a massive undertaking of technological engineering.

Originally posted by Cris
Kmguru has stated that he can’t see uploading taking place for perhaps another 150 years. I think it will occur much much sooner than that, within then next 20 possibly but certainly within the next 50.

In my defense:

While I would love to see the scenarios from Ray Kurzweil (The age of spiritual machines) come to fruitition, my speculation is based on global dynamics including many other social, economic, religious factors that could easily derail the timing of the events.

The future is a confluence of non-linear streams of events. The dynamics have changed since 9/11 and continue to do so in an erratic pattern until we reach a new plateau. While paradigm shifts are a given outcome, identifying that shift is very difficult without a decent global model.

Therefore my projection ...

Have the events of 9/11 etc etc slowed or even accelerated Moore's law? Kmguru is right, to the extent that global events and ideas influence technological development (if we were still in the space race we might be to mars by now). Likewise, when the "religious people" start speaking out about the evils of mind uploading and a.i etc the process will likely be slowed, directly or indirectly.

But I wouldn't dilute the time of these things being as commonplace as game boys to 150+ years, I'd give it seventy, tops. But what do I know?:D

Hi Q,


The brain processes different types of information simultaneously from the various senses; images from the eyes, sounds from the ears, etc. How would you incorporate these functions into an AI platform and would you expect this advent of technologies adding to your time-lines ?

I would think that the processing of images alone would be a massive undertaking of technological engineering.Image processing is a significant issue. Image capture is not the issue; that we can do quite well, it is the interpretation of the image that is the problem.

The human brain holds a large knowledge base that allows it to interpret what it sees. Some image processing machines can capture images and can make some sense of what it sees but to be truly effective it must have that all important knowledge base plus a massively powerful processing mechanism that can search the database with sub-second response times.

This isn’t so much a question of complexity but of raw power. Note also that the human brain does not hold detailed images but only vague outlines. The brain is then very good at filling in missing details.

No, the time-line doesn’t change, the key factor is that all important increase in power that we should achieve if Moore’s law holds true.

Using Moores Law and stretching convential techniques we should have the hardware in place in 20 years and i guestimate another 10 years of "DNA like breeding" of software (nature has programmed in millions of years) before SKYNET will wake up and take over the earth....

But maybe the latest developments in quantumcomputers can speed up that process. We are already at 7 qubits capacity and the use of josephson switches promises the use of thousands of interlinked entangled quantum dots, each capable of millions of quantum states...


It's only Sci-Fi until some dude build it in his garage...

when the "religious people" start speaking out about the evils of mind uploading and a.i etc the process will likely be slowed, directly or indirectly.
I think the scenario Cris outlined is possible but is highly unlikely. Why? Look at the debate that has slowed down stem cell research. That is peanuts, actually much less than peanuts, when compared to some of the public backlash we will get from developments in AI. There will be so many strangeholds and restrictions put on R&D...if we can develop human level AI in less than 50 years I will be very (pleasantly) surprised. I may be wrong, but I think once people start seeing just how close we are to reaching some incredible milestones, they are gonna freak out.

fading,


think the scenario Cris outlined is possible but is highly unlikely. Why? Look at the debate that has slowed down stem cell research. That is peanuts, actually much less than peanuts, when compared to some of the public backlash we will get from developments in AI. There will be so many strangeholds and restrictions put on R&D.I think you are only viewing this issue from the perspective of the USA. In the UK for example there are virtually no limits on stem cell research and the government there are actively encouraging such research. The same is true for many other countries. The issue with the USA right now is that its government is dominated by the religious right. A democrat led administration might change that but not by much. The USA will simply lose the lead in anything that results from stem cell activities.

Fortunately, for AI, the computing power in hardware will arrive first, and likely before anyone quite realizes what is happening. Once the technology is out then it will be impossible to put back in the bottle. But it will be the software that will be key to AI, and anyone anywhere in the world can write software. China and Asia are rapidly recruiting and training programmers in droves and we in the USA are actively given them a lot of our work because they work for much lower salaries.

The other fortunate thing about AI taking on human level intelligence is that religionists will probably believe their own propaganda and refuse to believe that man can create anything superior to man; and man is God’s ultimate creation, right?


I think once people start seeing just how close we are to reaching some incredible milestones, they are gonna freak out.And by that time, hopefully, the software, or its seeds will have been copied a trillion times all over the world. After that the USA will be out of the picture and mankind had better wake up very fast.

At least that is my optimistic view.

I think you are only viewing this issue from the perspective of the USA.
Yep you are right. I wasn't aware that such stem cell research was occuring in UK. Good to know.


China and Asia are rapidly recruiting and training programmers in droves and we in the USA are actively given them a lot of our work because they work for much lower salaries.
I used to be one of those programmers hehe. Don't forget India...lots of talented programmers there doing what I used to be. Could be a serious problem for US in the future.


And by that time, hopefully, the software, or its seeds will have been copied a trillion times all over the world. After that the USA will be out of the picture and mankind had better wake up very fast.
Maybe so...it would be interesting at least... :)

Are there any good books out there on this topic? Can be sci-fi but I would prefer fact-based...

AI update:

A proposal is being presented to a US agency to do an AI precursor to fight against terrorism. Will keep you posted if such a program is ready to be implemented by us or our competitor.

May be we could have something going sooner than I think.

Wars do tend to cause a rapid increase in technology.

What about storage media? How much information, in the form of memory, does the human brain have? RAM=short term, ROM= long term?

AI would have massive implications in the manufacturing world, and this would tend to override any qualms by anyone else, as money talks. However, a thinking machine would effectivly replace a human worker, cheaply.

Im not sure, based on my very limited knowledge of AI, that a machine could think. Remember? yes, they do now. Problemsolve? Maybe. Help me out here. The nuances of human thought are gossamer. AI would not be intelligent, as in human intelligence with out emotion to guide that intelligence, just a cold computer.

Maybe I need to read some more. Got any links?

Two points:

AI research and medical research are two different animals i the eyes of gov't regulation, aren't they? While one gets slowed down by red tape, I see AI being developed and pushed through BY the gov't. It's good to know that the UK is continuing in stem cell research.

And, while I'm fully for a positive development in AI and then true machine intelligence, there IS a danger, is there not? Joking aside about SKYNET/Matrix/etc, they aren't an impossible scenario. Not likely either...usually the future throws a curve no one saw, but just as nanotech has their gray goo potential, AI has the problems with potentially overrunning its creators before they know it.

Pessimistic or realistic?

The problem with having "human AI" is not really in the hardware. It's the software. We can't even get computers to have equivalent vision sytems as people.

I think we may have very powerful computers soon, but no so human like. as was said, processing power is not enough.

I can build them now. But it is not AI. AI never even started to work.

In an effort to acquire and maintain (or better yet, transcend the realm) of the edge that military powers (as the United States) possess, by not only being the pioneers and leaders in, the very field of, innovative military strategies that (in turn) gaved them opportunity to have that unfair advantage, but also by staying
two-steps ahead of any potential counter-reaction to their war strategy innovations, our company have this unprecedented ingenuity, which comes now, as an opportunity for these very powers to cater to in reasuring that very 'short-of-ultimate' global power "two steps ahead" edge.

It is called Business Process Reengineering, BPR for short. It did take off in military but not in commercial sector. James Champy got upset and wrote another book called x-engineering.

Interesting scenario...

did you catch the snippet in Sciam about the guys with the slices of the brain and the 20 years worth of nueron level mapping and the bizness?

Chris,

<i>"brain does not hold detailed images but only vague outlines."</i>

Justify this statement please.
as i have heard Sub-consious brain holds every detailed form of data including imaging,only fact is that recalling power of that memory chunk is poor,isnt it?
just curious...



bye!

BRAIN DOES NOT HOLD DETAILED IMAGE BUT ONLY VAGUE OUTLINE sir,your outline is,your image?in other words,the brain do hold detailed imagery!!:mad:

The human brain is not organized anything like a modern computer.

The human memory is not organized like a computer database. It is more like an incredible number of hyperlinks. There is no index in the computer sense of the term.

A human brain can not be viewed as having software and hardware. It is like a computer which is constantly being rewired.

A human brain does not store data, it rewires itself. Furthermore, we know that the stored data relating to something like a Rsoe bush is scattered around the brain in a strange fashion. The outline of the green petals is stored with other outline dat, while the green & red colors are stored someplace else. The words relating to the rose bush and all its characteristics are simlarly scattered. The memory of how to say those words is stored separately.

If you read about the functioning of people with various types of brain injuries, you might be amazed. For example, some people can recognize colors visually, but cannot say the words red, blue, green, et cetera.

Considering the apparent speed of individual components, it is very fast at certain operations. A computer usually takes longer to decide that a searched for item is not there. A human can often say I never saw that guy/girl before almost immediately, while it might take a while to remember somebody you knew many years ago. This suggests some fundamental difference in organization.

We have very little knowledge of how to build a computer system which would function like a human brain, and there is eveidence that se cannot do it with raw processing power and huge memory resources.

The computers who beat chess experts can hardly do anthing else.

A HUMAN BRAIN DOES NOT RESTORES DETA,IT REWIRES ITSELF. electroimage/visual transformation i,e.,etc.

Yeah.
There is so much we don't know about how the brain works (well at least, there is so much, I don't know). It seems like most of what we do know is along the lines of: If we stick a fork in this part of the brain, he smells chocolate, but if we stick it in this part over here, he loses the ability to recognize human faces.

Hopefully we wont really have to understand it totally, in order to make it (like the approach of the research at Ai, that company in Israel, developing the HAL language system (http://www.a-i.com/) ).

Anyway, I'm always sceptical of the recent timelines saying 30 to 60 years and we'll have human level AI. We might have the technology to make it happen, but the knowledge might elude for longer than that. I always like to keep in mind that all futurists seem to say 30 - 60 years for this or that. But where's my flying car damn it!!!

if we are first to assume that the human brain is fully functional outside of the body- say put a brain in a jar on feed it output, it would spit back responces like a computer, I would say that computers won't be able to reach human levels of intelligence untill each bit of computer memory is also a proccessor.

What I mean is that having one central proccessor and lots of memory like we do in today's machines it limited by the fact that you can only look at 32 or 64 bits of memory at a time. a given desktop pc today can only do one thing on at maximum 64 bits of data. that just a string of ones and zeros. imagine trying to learn some new programming technique if you could only keep one word in your mind at a time. you'd have to link each one to the other, and re-reference each word every time to read a new word, just to remember what you had just read. and in doing so, you would forget the new word!

until each one (on) and each zero (off) in the machine memory is represented by the proccessor states ( processing (on) and idle (off) ) of a billion small proccessors, we won't be even close to mimicing the human brain. Don't forget that while a neuron may fire @ about 200htz, it has access to many more nuerons, who are also all fireing at 200htz- and important note-not all in sync! the variation of neuron frequency from one area of thebrain to another may hold more information that we realize, and there is no physical item that we can disect to reverse engineer.

We're still long way off, IMO

We are not going to get human level AI using faster versions of current systems with more memory and other resources. Lots of parallel systems hooked to a huge common memory is a start, but that is probably not the way to go either.

Moores's law will fizzle out sooner or later. Nothing exponential can keep up for ever, not even for a long time.

What we need is an incredible new concept thought up by a genius. This could happen tomorrow or 200 years from now. Our current technology is not even close to any architecture that will do the job, and to repeat: More of what we now have is not the way to go.

Neural nets might be the answer, but that technology is in its infancy.

Remember that there have been a lot of failed technologies that held great promise. One outstanding example is cryogenic computers. Many bright people thought that systems operating near absolute zero with superconducting circuitry would be the wave of the future. Some small prototypes were actually built and tested, indicating that the concept had a lot of potential. Huge amounts of money were poured into that research, which has gotten nowhere and has been given up as a lost cause.

If I were told to develop human level AI, the best idea I could think of would be to spend a lot of money, time, and resources trying to determine what the brain of a 7-8 month old fetus is like. If you could simulate that electronically, it might learn for itself in less time than it takes a human brain to mature. Seems a lot easier that trying for an adult brain.

We might never develop human level AI due to practical considerations. Suppose it cost 5 million or more in current US dollars. A human is cheaper than that. Suppose you cannot get human level AI without some of the undesirable characteristics of a human being. I do not want my computer talking back to me and refusing to do boring accounting work. Suppose you have to let the system learn like a human, and cannot predict what its potential will be? AI is great if you can order ten engineers, 25 accountants, and some actuaries. What do you do with the artists, writers, and playboy personalities? Suppose, you have to contend with 2% being very clever electronic psychopaths that cannot be diagnosed until they actually do some serious damage. Does anybody remember an equipment breakdown that blacked out about 6-8 states for a day or so 20-30 years ago? If it had happened at night, there would have been aerial carnage from New York to Boston. During the day, all the pilots flew visually and left the crowded skies over New York almost as soon as they realized there was no air traffic control. A malevolent AI device could wreck havoc. Suppose, intelligence comes with the lower level of reliability common to most humans.Intelligence is a tricky capability with a lot of potentially devastating unintended consequences.

I do not really believe in most of the above practical problems, but the cost effectiveness issue could kill human level AI. A human being is a damn capable device, and parents pay for most of their training and education (Id est: The programming comes cheap).

Originally posted by Cris



The Software.

But computing power alone will not be enough; we also need the software. And that should also not be a problem. As CPUs have become increasingly powerful recently we have seen a corresponding increase in the interest in AI software. The best approach, I still believe, is to emulate the neural networks of the human brain, and that is actively being pursued.



Maybe we can run it on Windows 95. That should ensure smooth transaction among digital neurons. However, you maybe forgetting no matter however powerful the computer it is still linear. It can't make decisions on it's own and god knows we don't have such knowledge yet to to make a analog program and i doubt we will in another 20 years. Programming has made great strides in the last 20 years but to programming a enviroment stable enough to chart the human brain is a astronomical task. We'll wait and see....i doubt we'll live long enough to see your proposed ideas come to life, we'll probably kill ourselves before that happens.


P.S. "will we still throw hissy fits even if we are in computers"

As much as the technology develops it is far to much a task to even get the AI of a infant down let alone a human being. How do you account for creativity. If Computers do reach human equivilance in computing power can they write a "Romeo and Juliet", can they come up with a language of their own and utilize it in a efficient way. Can they paint, or even think of up a concept of a "the Sisitine Chapel". Getting to the point of having the same processing capabilities of a human brain is highly improbable (infact i think it's downright impossible) but even if it gets done it is still not the same as getting the AI to be human. It'll take unimagined skills in math and engennering to achieve what's proposed here and then keep in mind htat just achieveing normal, mediocre intelligence. How would you account for your Einsteins and Mozarts and Steven Hawkings. Will the Computer really be able to form his/her own consiousness and ponder about it's enviroment. I mean a scanning a picture of it's enviroment and putting it together to make it's own conclusions of what is there will itself require umparalled amounts of processing power but then it also has to que into the audio sensory around it too and combine it with the optical images ina less than a second.....see what i mean...getting it to do the simplest task will require major efforts. Face it guys, nature has us beat in the Ai department. It created a compact, 4lb, mother of all processing machines, and gave it to us for free. . So why not make regular humans the regular way. It's easy and ask anyone it's a lot of fun:D .

dinosaur
very enlightening posts
thanks

From what I have heard mentioned before it's what would be called a Meta image or a Layer.

The idea is that the brain works not with full images but patterns.

For instance if you think of someones face (someone that is close to you) you might immediately think of them with no problems, thats because at that time there are multiple layers that exist and the combined amount isn't "Fragmented".

(I say fragmented as I mean it in regards to the original Fragmenting of some content on a harddrive)

The Longer you are away from that person you thought of, the more you brain fragments with new influences. So the image starts to get less and less like them, and you will find yourself having to "Process" more to fill in the gaps and make the illusion of their face whole again.

The reason for this is when you process the image, it's like a Dot to dot in the brain, and you have to draw all the numbers together.

This is why the human brain can recognise multiple persons faces, and will build something similar to a compositing library from those that you know to save space.

This is also why it's very easy to mistake somebody for someone else.

I believe that AI is coming faster than we expect it to, because of the Technological Singularity. Obviously, we first need a machine that'll hold the equivalent of a human brain, and then perhaps we could copy a brain by activating all the possible reactions in the brain and putting these reactions into a simulation of somekind.
Also, once we create AI, what's to stop that intelligence from creating a higher intelligence, and so forth, and so on, until an intelligence beyond human, beyond even superhuman is created.
Hopefully there's still enough time for me to have some fun before society is warped by a super intelligent artificial entitiy.

Gurglo

Hey, hey Cris!

Glad to see you're still hanging in there.

At least some things haven't changed over here.

Take care.

:m: :cool: :m: