Re: Robot Evolution

Bob Kolker quoted me as quoting:
Tim Tyler wrote:

"By 2020, $1,000 (£581) worth of computer will equal
the processing power of the human brain," he says.
"By the late 2020s, we'll have reverse-engineered
human brains."

Want to bet?

AI in excess of human intelligence has been fifty years in
the future since 1956. A hundred years from now it will
still be fifty years in the future.

The processing power of the hardware /is/ getting there:

Moravec's estimate for the processing power of the
brain is 100 teraflops.

The fastest commercial supercomputer in public operation
today, IBM's BlueGene/L, uses 65,536 custom PowerPC cores to
achieve 367 teraflops, or around a third of a petaflops.

A one petaflops machine - ten times exceeding Moravec's
model human - is scheduled for construction in 2008:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39276005,00.htm

The PS3 clocks in at 2 teraflops. A couple reportedly cost
about $1000 to make today. That's about 4.65 doublings away
from the human brain's rating. Moore's law has doubling in
about 24 months:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

That would makes the date of hardware equality at
$1000 around Q1, 2017 - not much different from
the predicitons of Ray Kurzweil and Arthur C Clarke -
who peg the date at around 2020.

I don't know when we will have "reverse-engineered
human brains". The statement seems a bit vague.

I think of super AI the same way as I think of controlled
fusion reactions to produce cheap energy. Ever and always in
the future.

Common use of fusion looks like it is further off.

According to officials from the recent international
$12.8 billion nuclear fusion reactor project:

``Officials involved in the project say 10 percent to 20
percent of the world's energy could come from fusion by
the end of the century.''

- http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/4359033.html
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Robot Evolution
    ... > Tim Tyler wrote: ... >> the processing power of the human brain," he says. ... The processing power of the hardware /is/ getting there: ... Common use of fusion looks like it is further off. ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: Robot Evolution
    ... >> the processing power of the human brain," he says. ... The processing power of the hardware /is/ getting there: ... The main problem I see with biotech, is its stunted development, ... A failure to promptly and rapidly develop our biological heritage ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: Old news but still worth noting: Computers rule chess
    ... What is the raw performance of the human brain, ... It appears that your postulation is that computers have the neccessary ... processing power, but the software does not take advantage of it, right? ...
    (rec.games.go)