Re: The Nanotech Rapture


On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:09:50 -0500
Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:

Therein lies the big difference between AI and molecular
moanufacturing - there are people who have a clue how to start on the
latter.

I don't really see it. Expert systems are all over the place.

Expert systems are pretty simple things that haven't got much more
sophisticated since the 1970s, just cheaper and faster.

My computer can recognise speech pretty well - considering its
CPU is smaller than my thumbnail.

So could an Apple ][ in 1980, albeit with a pretty low vocabulary.

We know lots about how to build AI.

Not of the kind of capability that produces new designs and thinks
creatively. We know how to build iterative problem solvers and train simple
neural networks but we have no idea how to structure a creative thinker.

It looks to be in reach today in terms of hardware capability,
software is a big problem. This is why I suggest that it may not turn
up on schedule for nanotech development. Human scale AI is no longer a
hardware problem.

At the very least, computing power for AI has to become cost-
competitive
with human brainpower before it can be widely deployed. It might make

Absoulutely - but it only has to be feasible before real design
work can take place. It is feasible and the designs aren't there.

Anyway we're off topic now. However to drag us back on topic and
show one way of avoiding the need for AI while still producing things too
hard for a human being to design, consider this.

Suppose we have (at least one) device capable of making complex
nano-machines from an instruction "tape". Suppose we also have a device
capable of making instruction tapes. We can use genetic techniques to start
with random tapes and some fitness tests to evolve tapes that produce
devices meeting a specification. See for example the work being done at
Sussex University on evolving hardware.

--
C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays
The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun
You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see
| http://www.sohara.org/

.