[ExI] AI Motivation revisited

[Stefano Vaj]

On 1 July 2011 08:52, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> No, you can't. Human activities are short-lived, so you're
> limited to less than 10 years. 0.6 MIPS (no FPU).


As long as you go on, replacing along the way dead humans (and perhaps dead
planets, since the time I suspect it would take) what's the problem?

Floppy is 360 kBytes, and for pracical reasons you can't use more
> than 10 k of these, so it's about 4 GByte of state.
> A 360 kBytes floppy writes at about 32 kBytes/s, so you
> need over 100 days just to write these once. Add handling,
> wear, diagnostics and error correction and you can
> easily multiply that by 2 or more.
>

Why on the earth can't I use more that 10k floppies? And what is 100 days if
I have all the time of the world? My point is not that the original PC would
be very performing.

My point is that we would still recognise as "sentient" a man slowed down by
a factor of 10x, 1000x, 10^10x, etc., so that as a pure Gendankenexperiment
my example is valid.


> > OTOH, I am by no means certain that organic brains are so poorly
> optimised
> > to run "AGI" programs in comparison with other conceivable, eg, silicon,
> > supports.
>
> It's the opposite. When Sun (vanquished by Orkcackle) said
> that the network is the computer they spoke truer than they
> knew. Silicon has lousy fanout, and modern systems are
> extremely poor at parallelism. Which is why you need huge
> clusters with millions of cores to do something quite
> trivial.
>

Yes, we fully agree on that (even though the typical counterargument is that
organic brains have been molded by evolution and natural selection, which
could have constrained us in some less-than-ideal paths in the space of all
those theoretically possible, and which could be adopted by design).

Conversely, organic brains are not so brilliant with basic arithmetics.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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