We are on the threshold...

[iMac722]

I would imagine that a few years from now computers will be everywhere and the entire world's population will have them because they will be so cheap by then. Then, by the year 2015 the first computer that is the equivilent of the human brain will appear( assuming that computer power doubles every eighteen months) it will have the same processing power and the same memory capacity, in about ten years we have that power on our desktops and in about 5 years we have that pocket sized. By then we will have friends that we can talk to like any individual human, or a Matrix scenario when those computers take over the world. Around the time when that first computer pops up our technology will skyrocket we will be much smarter, stronger, and be able to do anything we want pretty much. We will be able to travel between the stars colonize new worlds and become the Homo Superior like in the game, we can not avoid this it is our destiny(providing that we dont kill ourselves first) and eventually transend.

[Lord Maxwell]

Aren't we the little optimist. Computer power will likely not continue to double every 18 months, as consumer interest is actually going down. (Well, it is generally high, but people more often buy 6 months old products today than two years ago. Maybe due to less "techiness" among consumers.)

Besides, a mere increase in computer power will not simulate a brain. As long as they are based on integer operations in linear space they cannot do it efficiently. (We have 200 billion (or 1/10, I never get these words right in English. Or 10 times as many. Well, look it up, it's 200*alot! (Where, oh where is my dictionary?) "nodes" in our brain, and each connects to approx 5000 others. These connections were "well understood" until a few years ago, when people figured out that there was several powers of ten more things going on in each connection than previously believed. (They exchange large-scale electrochemical signals, as well as a host of smaller scale signals.)
There is also a likelihood that we will need to base them on organic matter to replicate the behaviour, but then we loose the so valued predictability with computers.
And there is certain limits that are approaching. (We need a better understanding of the randomness of the quantum world pretty soon, and that field isn't looking to bright. We need room-temperature superconductors. etc etc. We will get there. But in the 80s I heard that we would have colonized the moon by now. Still waiting to go skiing on the sea of tranquility. Leave the predictions to Nostradamus. (Besides, with history as a guide, we will likely think of something new and interesting and more or less drop development. We have the collective attention span of a 7-year old ODing on amfetamine.

[Obi Wan Kenobi]

I'm pretty sure there are 200 billion neurons in our brain, if that's what you mean...

[Vi Vicdi]

I am quite certain that computer power will easily surpass that of the human brain if it already hasn't.

The problem ain't the hardware; it's the software.

"It ain't the crate -- it's the pilot who flies it."
-- "Red Baron" Manfred von Richtofen

[Qilue]

Plus, the human brain can update the the state of individual neurons with no effect on other parts of the brain.

Lastly, apart from some corruption by outside influences, there are no bugs in the brain's programming, at least none that are known.
[This message has been edited by Mouse (edited January 30, 2000).]

[Urban Ranger]

Unfortunately, there are. Known in some other circles as "genetic defects."

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If I can't believe in my own eyes, whose eyes can I believe? Yours?!

[Lord Maxwell]

VV: Nope, it isn't even within a factor of a million in connection power. Computers are still way behind, they are to linear to be able to simulate true intelligence. (Off course, there has been some promising research on fuzzy chips.)
But sure, it counts the decimals of pi faster than you. (It's a hassle to simulate a neural net using software only, all the floating point calculations mess it up. You need to make 200billion*5000 floating point operations per second, merely to update the state of the synapses. )

[Qilue]

True, but our brains don't need rebooting after they generate General protection faults.

yes, but what about seizures? i work with people who have hardcore medications for their seizures... beasties with side effects that we can't discern because they're taking so many other meds. besides, there is a chemical reboot, known as psychotropic drugs. sounds fun, right, but one of the side effects could cause you to walk around with your arm sticking 45 degrees in the air four your entire waking life, without a damn thing you can cousciously do about it.
[This message has been edited by edgecrusher (edited January 31, 2000).]

[Qilue]

Ok, I guess I shouldn't bother posting on this thread any more, since few here understand humour and are more interested in being intellectually superior.

[Bkeela]

iMac722, I think you've been playing SMAC a bit too much...

Bkeela.

[Lord Maxwell]

Ok, some more info on the brain. It consists of 200 billion neurons. Each is made up of the cell body proper, an axon and several dendrites. (Up to 10000+ in extreme cases.)
The dendrites are the incoming ports, and the axon the outgoing port. (It branches near the end to interface with several dendrites belonging to other neurons.)

It takes an axon 1/1000 second to flash. It does so by sending a jolt of about 55 millivolts down it's length. It seems to create this current by some smart gates, that only let certain types of ions through. By stocastic processes it thus creates the needed voltage to signal in less than 1/1000 second. Luckily for us, it is binary in it's nature, it flashes, or it don't.
To avoid the loss of voltage over distance it is sheated in a fatty tissue, known as the myelin sheath. This sheath is broken up at intervals (it consists of short tubes) and these intervals are called ranvier nodes. They play an important role in keeping the speed up.
The signal that travels down these axons consists of the ion gates opening, and rapidly closing again.
Teh signal is sent out from the cell body when it is stimulated enough by the data it receives from it's dendrites.
It regulates signal "strength" not through the voltage level, but through the interval between firing. The more it wants to make itself heard, the more often it fires.

So, we have 200billion neurons (by conservative measurements, Nauta and Feirtag, 1986, placed it at 1000 billion neurons), which can accept about 1000 values each, at intervals of 1 millisecond. Weigh the income and decide whether or not to send out a signal. Everything except the weighing is simple binary switching. So, we need to make 2*10^12 binary adjustments per second (this is the maximum of what the brain can do), each binary adjustment is the result of a poll of about 1000 other adjustments. So we need to poll 2*10^15 times per second.
Now, your average supercomputer could do 8*10^12 polls per second. (Given 8192 processors with 1Ghz speed each, making one poll per clock tick, which is unreasonably fast.) You see that we lag by a factor of 100000 even under ideal conditions.

Now consider the fact that the brain never "blocks" on an I/O. (A state that is often encountered in a computer, and serious part of os programming is made to avoid it.)

We need a new model for mass-scale calculations, as well some serious increase in hardware.

Now, if the cutting edge research is correct there is a chance that the brain does a few million times as many operations per second. (Circumstantial evidence point to the brain using quantum processes in the gap between axons and dendrites as well. This is not proven yet, but if this is the case we suddenly have a much more complex situation.)

Can a computer be built to model this. Sure. How do we train it? Nobody knows? How do we pre-weigh the neural net? Nobody knows? And experimenting in the field is damn expensive, as you need computers about as good as those at fort meade. And I fear the nsa has better uses for it's computing power.

Off course, we could get rid of all the muscular neurons, and most of the sensory neurons. The vast majority are in the gray area between, where the "real action" seems to be. These are called interneurons. We can't get rid of these just yet.

So, hands down boys, we are only a few steps closer to this goal today than we were in the seventies.

And even when we do, how do we know if androids dream of electric sheep? (ie, there are quite a few philosophical grey areas here.) As of yet no computer has been able to pass even the simple Turing test, much less proven "true" intelligence according to more exact measurements.

[Thaum]

Very interesting thread. Tell me Lord Maxwell, where are you getting this information as I think it is fascinating and like to read up on it.

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For it is the folly of men that they forget!

Excalibur

[Bblue]

Blade Runner fan Lord Maxwell?

sorry if i came off like an ass. it's just that with my line of work, nobody seems to understand these things. people seem to think nowadays that prozac is cool, but it, like all meds are a last resort. people whose brains have tripped the 'general protection fault' as it were don't come back. it can't be fixed, or rebooted. again, i apologize if i killed the thread, but something struck a nerve.

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"edgecrusher" Spartan Probe Team 'angelis'

[Lord Maxwell]

Thaum: Got it from Gleitman - Psychology, 4th edition. (printed by Norton in 1995. I think there is a fifth ed out or on it's way.) We used it for psychology 101 at the university. Pretty good book though.

Bblue: What made you think that?

[JoJoTheDogFacedBoy]

Is the "average" neuron really accepting 1000 signals every millisecond? That's really what needs to be used in the calculation, or so it seems to me, at least.

I'd also point out that specialized neural network hardware could introduce a huge factor increase in speed. The problem with doing NN stuff on "normal" processors is that they're designed to be general purpose - they do one thing at a time as fast as possible, and you do complex things by doing lots of little things in sequence. By hardwiring NN chips, you could do the calculations massively (thousands of times) more quickly. Obviously the chips need to be semi-tweakable to change NN weights, but there is some work going on in that direction (see MIT's Oxygen project, for instance).

Don't get me wrong - we're still a long ways away from modeling the human brain in silicon. I just think we're closer than you seem to be saying when you just examine the computing power required. Actually getting the thing to work is another matter entirely.

[Thaum]

Thanks LM.

[Lord Maxwell]

JoJoetcetc...: No, it's not on an average polling (recalculating weight) on all incoming signals every millisecond. But it seems to be able to. (It more or less instantly changes due to stimulation, and can indeed change as fast as 1ms. We rarely see phenomena that cause a neuron to flare 1000 times in a second though. The thing is that with silicon the ability to flash once every 1 ms is equivalent to the ability to flash 1000 times a second. Not so for the organic version. Or maybe it can, it just never gets a reason to...)
Each neuron needs to be able to flare at the latest 1ms after the state of the inbound signals change. And it need to be able to flare again 1ms later if irritation persists. So, we need to be able to flare damn often.

And as you said, building the hardware is probably ALOT easier to do than to make it work. We currently have little idea about how much is hardwired in the human brain, and how, and why and etc.

We will get there, simply because we obsess about it. No matter if it takes six months or a million years, once a group of humans settle down on something they become slightly simple minded. (Most problems can be solved by chipping await at the indefinitely.) Remains to be seen when we do so however.

[BustaMike]

I dunno what you guys are talking about. AI is already here. Just look at Al Gore. :-)

[Stefu]

BustaMike: But doesn't AI mean Artificial Intelligence? [/quote]

[Stefu]

BustaMike: But doesn't AI mean Artificial Intelligence? [/quote]

here it means Artificial Idiot.
[This message has been edited by edgecrusher (edited February 07, 2000).]

[Kinjiru]

Jojo stated:
"we're still a long ways away from modeling the human brain in silicon"

This got me thinking. There is an outer limit to the speeds we can reach with present pyhsics. Basically silicon will melt once we we reach certain processing speeds. So we have two choices, cool it down (lots of superconducting benefits as a side bonus) or use different materials. As for different materials we really only have two choices if we want to stay ahead of the heat problem, light (photons, quantum computing, whatever) or organic materials. There is promising work (well maybe promising is too strong, at least work) in both of these areas.

Let's say we crack the organic bit first. So we build a computer using organic materials and it blazes along really quickly, letting use do all sorts of useful things. If we were able to build such a machine, would we have created a functioning brain? Perhaps we could build a true to life, functional model of say, a chameleon brain. Processing input and developing it's own algorythms to 'decide' output. At what point would we have to stop refering to this creation as a machine?

Obviously, one answer is to start talking about the relationship between sentience and the soul. But that is simply an argument in which no one will convince anyone else of anything and lots of people will just end up upset. Can we talk about this without referencing some higher power?

So, when does a machine, built of organic material, cease to be a 'machine'? Is it the point at which the initial programming is fully replaced, or subsumed by self-developed programming? Is it the point at which linear computations/comparisons are surpassed? Is it the point at which a player cannot tell if he is playing Edgecrusher in a foul mood or an AI opponent?

[BustaMike]

I know it's off topic, but I can't help myself after the Al Gore comments. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying he's not an idiot... but America could do much much worse. WORSE = GEORGE W. BUSH

Quotes from Bush (all of these things he did actually say, though the exact phrasing may be a little off)

"I believe the American people is supportive of me." - people is plural buddy

"Indian gaming should not be allowed in Texas because the rights of the states take precidence over the rights of the Indian nations." - no, the Indian tribes are sovereign nations and are not subject to any laws which the state makes

Upon being questioned by a reporter to name the four leaders of four terrorist nations George W. Bush could name none.

And finally...

"I will not let my position be swayed by the wants of the people. Instead, I will govern America based on the principles of the republican party." - Let's have a look at that first sentence. HELLO! We live in a democracy, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

So, if by some wrotten chance it were to come down to Gore vs. Bush I would hope that Gore would win. I'm personally pulling for either McCain or Bradley although I haven't decided which I would vote for yet (leaning toward McCain). Just please don't let Bush win.

Um, back to the brain topic. I think originally this was intended to be sarcastic, so no I don't think we'll transcend in our lifetimes.
[This message has been edited by BustaMike (edited February 07, 2000).]

[BustaMike]

BTW... If you don't live in the US please disregard the post above.

[Vi Vicdi]

Hmph ... my political reasoning is quite similar to BustaMike's, although just as rabidly anti-Gore: I'm not a Republican, I just vote Republican because I hate Liberals, and in particular Al Gore.

Why?

Because he cast the deciding vote on the retroactive tax of 1993. That's right, you pay your taxes, then the government -- thanks to Gore's tie-breaking vote -- goes back in time and raises taxes and voila! you have to pay more! [Even if you died in the meantime. How's that for activist government?]

Thieves take your money against your will but are humble enough at least to admit what they're doing is wrong. Televangelists are rabidly convinced they have a right to your money but are easily overcome by simply ignoring them. Liberals combine the worst of these two traits -- they are nothing but common thieves, taking your money by force, but with the added arrogance of the Televangelist thrown in. "Give us your money. We know what's best. We're helping you with the programs we create for you. By the way, if you don't support The Arts [or whatever else we decide you should pay for] you'll go to jail for tax evasion, which would serve you right for being so greedy. There are more important things than money, you know." [Yeah, like not being a hypocrite.]

Dirty rotten pillaging scum. Better an idiot who won't raise taxes than a genius who thinks he knows what's best for my money.

They say venting your anger only gets you madder ... okay, count to 10 ... deep breaths ... think about Disco music ...

[Sikander]

Well, you both make excellent points in regards to Bush and Gore. The fact that both of them are the candidates backed by the establishments of their respective parties (read spoiled special interests like the Teacher's Unions and Big Tobacco) and I think we can comfortably predict that we will hate having either one as president.

As usual, Americans will disregard the actual powers of the presidency when making their selection, and will choose someone based upon his positions on legislation rather than his potential ability as commander in chief, head of state, chief law enforcement officer or any of the other stuff that the president actually does. And of course the election will be influenced by the economy, because Americans believe that the president is all-powerful here (and if Al Gore really did invent the internet he might have a case for his 20 million new jobs claim), though they will reward the incumbent for a good economy and punish him for a bad one regardless of what economic policy he may support. I swear that there is a conspiracy between the teachers unions and the dems to keep people so ignorant that they can't help but vote for these scum. The repubs don't object too much, since half the time it works to their advantage, and every politician's child goes to private school anyway.

Of all the candidates currently running, I like McCain the best, but I readily admit that this is an opinion based on a lot of ignorance. Still, he does oppose wasting money on the military, which goes a long way in my book. Billions for defense, but not one cent for pork! I predict that come this fall, I will be voting for the Libertarian again. Sigh...

[Vi Vicdi]

Ahh, Libertarian. How soothing to find a fellow Libertarian -- sort of like how an ecologist feels spotting a yellow-bellied sapsucker: you never think you'll see one during your whole lifetime, and then without warning you suddenly hear that distinctive warble, and almost in disbelief behold the impossible ... "oh, my, a yellow-bellied sapsucker."

OTOH ... if it's just a protest vote, I guess that would make you more of a mockingbird?

[Sikander]

I can see how I left the impression that my vote for a Libertarian is a protest vote. That is not the case. I always vote for the candidate I think is the best, regardless of their chance of success (as beaten into my head by the media for the last year in an unsubtle attempt to control the election).

My 'sigh' indicates that I don't think that either of the major party candidates (my guess is Bush n' Gore) are worthy of my vote, and that I will likely go elsewhere, which in recent elections has been the Libertarian candidate. The fact that I don't know who the Libertarian candidate will be and still think it likely that I will vote for him / her, explains the sigh.

I am an Independant, though Libertarian candidates are most likely to get my vote, followed by Republicans (usually when there is no Libertarian). It is very rare that I can get it up for a Democrat, though I do listen to what they have to say. Since it usually involves passing restrictive laws, increasing the public sector of the economy, and otherwise using the constitution as a napkin to wipe their hands on after feasting at the public trough, I stay away. Way back in the 1970s you could actually find a few libertarian style democrats, but today they are all but extinct. I like the 'economic' repubs to some extent, and find the christian right as obnoxious as most people do, though I don't really fear them directly. They do pose a threat in a more indirect manner through their ignorance.