[ExI] Benchmarking the Singularity

[Brent Allsop]

I completely agree.  What a great, educational post.
I had the same inspiring thoughts John was describing.
Thanks
Brent Allsop

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 6:12 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 3:18 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Stuart, thanks for an absolutely first rate post, it was detailed yet
> clear. Really really good.
>
> > *The hilarious irony of the situation is that if my theory is correct,
>> then a human brain has to subconsciously perform tensor analysis in order
>> to reach the conclusion that it is lousy at math.*
>
>
> Damn, I wish I'd said that!
>
>
>>
>>
>> *> In other words, in terms of total number of neurons, the  human brain
>> is some 4 million times larger than AlphaGo's. In terms of  synapses it is
>> likewise on order 10^6 times smaller than the human  brain.*
>>
>
> I doubt a computer would  need a million times more synapses to beat us at
> all intellectual tasks, for one thing the average informational signal in
> our brain moves about as fast as a car does on a turnpike while the
> informational signal in a computer moves at close to the speed of light.
> And I would bet money that the artificial neurons in AlphaGo's brain are
> organized in a more efficient less buggy way than the neurons in our brain
> are.
>
> A raven's brain is only about 17 cubic centimeters, a chimpanzees brain is
> over 400, and yet a raven is about as smart as a chimp. And the African
> Grey Parrot has demonstrated an understanding of human language at least as
> deep as that of a chimpanzee and probably deeper, this despite the fact
> that the chimp's brain is about 25 times as large. I suppose that when
> there was evolutionary pressure to become smarter a flying creature
> couldn't just develop a bigger, heavier more energy hogging brain; instead
> of the brute force approach it had to organize the small light brain it
> already had in more efficient ways. Our brains are about 1400 cm, but I'll
> bet centimeter by centimeter ravens are smarter than we are. Being called a
> birdbrain may not be an insult after all. For this reason I believe if one
> wishes to study the nature of intelligence then crows and ravens would be
> ideal candidates, compared with other animals their brains would be more
> elegantly designed and have less spaghetti code and hard to understand
> kludges.
>
>
>> * > Taking the average of the given range of 5 to 45 years, is 25 years.
>> But this assumes that Moore's law continues unabated.*
>
>
> I would be surprised if it happened in less than 10 years and equally
> surprised if it didn't happen until after 2100, but it is the nature of a
> singularity to be surprised.
>
>
>> *> On the other hand, the emergence of quantum computing stands to
>> disrupt everything,  *
>>
>
> There are a number of different approaches to quantum computing and lots
> of companies are starting to put some real money into it, but Microsoft (of
> all people!) is going with a high risk high reward strategy. Microsoft is
> trying to use Majorana Fermions to build a Topological Quantum Computer. It
> may not work at all but if it does they'll quickly blow everybody else in
> the field out of the water. They probably won't but Microsoft could
> surprise us.
>
>
>> * > Sorry, I couldn't be more precise in my estimates but to quote Yoda,
>> "Difficult to see; Always in motion is the future."*
>>
>
> Predicting is hard, especially the future.
>
> John K Clark
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190720/6e69035c/attachment.htm>