[ExI] The present and future of AI

[Dylan Distasio]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 6:30 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> *> Does anyone here believe it will happen much later than that?*
>
>
> It could be later but if it does I think it would be due to societal
> factors and not because of technological limitations. I say this because
> thanks to biology we know of an upper limit on the amount of complexity a
> seed AI would need. In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion
> base pairs, there are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits, there are
> 8 bits per byte so that comes out to 750 meg which you could fit on an old
> fashioned CD audio disk. And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the
> genome so with file compression you'd probably need less than a third of
> that CD audio disk, and of course much of the genome is about stuff that
> has nothing to do with the brain or intelligence.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
You're missing a lot of additional information involved in creating a human
being from scratch.   The minimum information required goes very far beyond
knowing the sequence of the genome and is still not clear.  The order in
which genes are turned on and off and in what order during development is
crucial, and additionally vary by tissue type.   Additionally, the
information encoded in the exome alone just tells you the linear order of
amino acids strung together.  It tells you nothing about the information
encoded in the 3 dimensional folding of that protein and its interactions
with other proteins.  That's not even touching on the impact of methylation
in promoting or suppressing genes.

I realize we're most interested in the brain here, but it may be very
difficult to disentangle from these other factors in coming up with an
understanding how to build a brain from scratch.
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