Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

And what makes everybody think that a computer-simulated brain would run faster than a real one anyway? That's a Science Fiction cliche, but it doesn't hold up.

Simulating the number of neurons and their connections is beyond the capacity of *any* computer or network of computers today. Even lowering the bar for something with many fewer neurons than a human is much slower than the biological equivilent.

Yes, in the future, given that computer speeds and memory increase, then perhsps we could run a simultated human in acceptable time. However, I don't think this is anytime soon.

On the other hand, Bill is young enough that he might be able to live that long. :)

-- D. Jay Newman

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 16:22:40 GMT, "D. Jay Newman" wrote or quoted :

Because neural nets NOW work ever so much faster than wetware.

Brains currently have more computing power than neural nets simply because they have more neurons and these thing work in parallel.

Using Moore's law, computers should have equivalent computing power to a human brain in 2030 in a $1000 machine. And of course computers keep improving. The huge acceleration will happen once they get clever enough to start improving themselves.

Artificial neural nets tend to be more efficiently programmed. We use the human brain's algorithms as a starting point, then fine tune them.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

Is there something about napa the occasional tourist (me) should know?

They may be more 'efficiently' programmed, but there is no indication that they are programmed to achieve the functionality required for AI, since it is not yet understood how to design and train an advanced animal-level AI, let alone a human one. Efficient programming for the wrong problem doesn't help solve the right one.

We DON'T KNOW the human brain's algorithms.

Even allowing for Moore's Law, there's a big software research hurdle to overcome.

Gerry Quinn

Yes, human societies should be modeled after _human_ urges, which would be closer to other primates.

My viewpoint is that it seemed Rome had developed an extremely aberrant unnatural structure. It was like a bunch of wolves dressing themselves up in human bodies and starting to live among humans.

They were able to progress mightily for a while, and it took a lot of work and sacrifice to get rid of those wolves. Such social aberrations don't go away easily. Even so many centuries later, social vibrations originating at that point of time continue.

Napa is a nice area to visit. It's physically beautiful. Good resturants. Wonderful wineries (although I perfer the nieghboring Sonoma Valley). And...it's real close to the best city on earth...San Francisco!

However. It sucks to live here unless you are rich.

chris in napa

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 07:54:20 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote or quoted :

IIRC we have decoded about 26 of them, and once seen, improved. Once you see behind the green curtain, the intelligence does not seem so all fired wonderful and requiring of divine spark for explanation.

You are quite right of course that simply increasing capacity and speed without corresponding advances in programming would not let you solve the fuzzy sorts of problem humans excel at.

We have the huge advantage of being able to reverse engineer ourselves, and re implement our algorithms in far faster hardware.

In principle you could scan a brain destructively by laser, recording every connection. You might not understand how it works, but you could still simulate it.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

I vote we keep working on AI until we can simulate a brain that believes in UFOs, crop circles, Atlantis, etc.

-- Phlip

Your "we have decoded and improved 26 of the brain's algorithms" is essentially meaningless. You don't even know where to look for the curtain, let alone have any idea of what is behind it.

What's behind *your* green curtain is just handwaving.

No we don't. We might have sometime, but we don't now.

In principle we could, but we can't now.

Furthermore, the performance and capacity of a silicon system would have to be not just similar, but many times (I'd guess at least 1000) greater in order to provide an emulation of a system so different. Of course it should be possible to create genuinely artificial intelligences - as distinct from simulations of dead humans - without wasting so much computer power.

Gerry Quinn

I'd *really* like to try that with sound as controlling input and something 3D-ish as output.

Hmmm... Retirement isn't THAT far off. Wonder if Scripps or someplace like that would like a retired computer programmer who's always wanted to pal with dolphins? (-:

I think that will be very interesting!

SF author, David Brin, has his "Uplift" series wherein races raise near-sentient races to sentience. In his series, humans have uplifted dophins and chimps, and those species are nearly on par as partners.

One story thread is about a ship of humans and dolphins (who turn out to be master star pilots :-). Ship can be water-filled or not (or have much that is water-filled). And the dolphins have harnesses with articulated arms for manipulation!

That, I suspect, evolves over time. My guess is most primative languages are more basic (although I agree the geese are probably pretty far down the "primitive and basic" scale).

In that the phone is *selecting* a pattern of symbols--from an existing set--with the "intent" of communicating, I'd say it's a sort of language. Not one *evolved* by cell phones, obviously, but one *designed* by the designer(s) of cell phones.

The are different words with different meanings, I think. One refers primarily to the symbology, the other to the process of using a symbology.

I suspect a great deal (perhaps all) is instinct. But I suspect that instinctive behaviors can become social, intentional ones as a species evolves. How many of our practices have instinctive backgrounds?

Very much agreed! The question, then, is: does this reflect an

A fantasy I've always found endearing is the one that has cetaceans as hyper-intelligent beings who spend their time singing, playing and doing unbelievably complex "hyper-math" in their heads.

The problems is (ONE problem is), without passing on previous knowledge and work, does each figure it all out from primary causes? Does each re-invent what they know?

If they're intelligent enough to do "hyper-math", why aren't they intelligent enough to pool and pass on knowledge?

Or a very crude, simple one. Yes, I agree. I'm saying cats are not intelligent *enough* to have a language and a means of passing on detailed knowledge.

I'm seeing a "threshold" (which is a fuzzy dividing line at best) between "lower" and "higher" intelligence. I'm visualizing it as similar to the threshold between radioactive ores and a refined mass that goes BOOM! If you graphed energy output verses quality and mass of material, it's not linear, and at one point, the line has pretty much of a discontinuity.

I'm wondering if "higher" intelligence is not unlike critical mass. Get *enough* of the "right sort" of intelligence, and something goes "KA-BOOM"!

It may have to do with the fact that most people look very ugly naked. Consider this: would you want to sit your bare behind in a chair just vacated by someone else's bare behind?

Um, speak for yourself! (-:

(Some of us make a point of ignoring it.) Yes, well, we still are very social animals, aren't we. Part of that is Identification. We recognize others who are similar to us by their "markings". A goth can Identify other goths, for example.

A point Captain Kirk made many times! (-:

I don't think there's anything emotional about identifying a clear and present danger or in indentifying strategies to combat it. The desire to not die is not necessarily an emotional one.

It doesn't suprise me at all that we would derive inspiration from the others that share our world. Many of them have been a source of awe, companionship, food, safety or work for a VERY long time.

Maybe it helps to jump up and down and point... :-|

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 13:05:01 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

There's a guy in Hawaii named Hotson who has access to dolphins. He just does not have any money.

We were hosted at MarineWorld near Redwood city.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 14:52:06 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote or quoted :

what have you read on the topic of reverse engineering the human brain or neural nets?

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

David Brin is an interesting guy. He's a serious scientist, and the science he uses in his stories is generally very good. This sets him apart from a lot of SF authors, many of whom are actually writing Space Opera... you know, like Star Wars, Star Trek, etc :>

The prosthetic assistance was part of it, but the dolphins and chimps had also been genetically modified to enhance their intelligence - the actual Uplift process.

One of my favorite authors!

(His book of essays and short stories, OTHERNESS, is especially appropo in this thread.)

Absolutely! (I place STAR WARS as more Fairy Tale genre, anyway!) I like Robert Forward for the same reason.

Yes. (-:

Any serious reading of "Continental" philosophy causes these sorts of questions to seem absurd, and what is interesting is that a PROGRAMMER, hero computer scientist, thought them ungrammatical, ill formed and absurd.

"Can ai be conscious?" would be an interesting question if ai met one tenth of its technical promises, indeed, if it worked.

But what it proves is something of which Kant and Hegel were aware. Tis is that in fact the ability to reason-with-symbols is (1) mechanizable, (2) not definitiational of intelligence.

The "reasonintg" that may be definitional is that which subsumes itself (in, for example, Kant's transcendental analytic) in a benigh-rather-than-vicious circle and which participates in a collective and a social process of reasoning: not mathematical calculation at all.

What's amusing is that Hegel "knew" how to frame and answer what happens to be a question that exceeds the topos of natural science: for he called the mechanist explainers of his time, along with various quacks, "phrenologists" who pretended to crudely divide the brain in an operation which presumes that social organization is secondary without argument.

Words, my lord: words, words words. 17th century philosophers knew all about the structure of the real workd which consists, with an apparent irreducibility, of material extension in space and time, and an antiworld consisting of sensory qualia, dreams and reflections.

Reducing the one to the other is folly, and a philosopher's stone. Apprehending instead why it is we are even able to know the existence of the two worlds, and find ways to relate them, is what life is all about.

Toe believe in AI is dehumanizing for it presents the logical possibility of an impossible reduction. This is used by totalitarians of all stripes (including "libertarians") to excuse dehumanization.

But what is most germane to this ng is that belief in "ai" is positively correlated with inability to do math or program computers. "AI" consists merely of ill-understood software and it is a programmer's responsibility to understand his software. Sure, an expert system or neural net can "learn" and create a data base of useful facts. But this data base's utility depends STRICTLY on continued expert oversight, and legally so in the case of mission critical software.

The human element is necessary, and this happens not to be a scientific assertion at all. Instead its is philosophical and synthetic apriori: necessarily true. Transcendental arguments will be provided on request.