Cris

Calbiterol, I think your news may be quite old, if anything I suspect my predictions are somewhat conservative. Try this - http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/19/202244/053 However, I do share the view that brain augmentation is likely to be the way forward as we begin to take control of our future evolution. One of the nitty-gritty irritating details of minduplaoding is what to do with your human counterpart who provided the biological brain - do you kill him off - a kind of remote suicide. Off topic here I suspect. But a gradual repalcement of parts will achieve the same end without the ethical problems of pure MU.

All the species we observe exist because of certain evolutionary traits that have ensured their survival. Far more species have become extinct because of environmental changes or other failures to adapt. Humans are still a fairly young species and there is no guarantee that we will survive, in fact there are many indicators that show we may well nuke ourselves. Issues of morality eventuality reduce to survivability. In the Christian arena the claimed absolute set of moral rules, if followed, are meant to assure survival in paradise. At a rational level our survival is determined by following actions that are in our best interests; any behavior that is detrimental to other individuals or a group will be quickly isolated by others and the offenders are quarantined or removed from the species. It becomes a matter of survival of the fittest and in human terms that means the ability to think clearly. It doesn’t require religion for us to discover independently that cooperation with others results in mutual benefit and fostering a loving and social environment also assists with our long survivability – these are simply rational determinations that have been part of our evolutionary path and why we have been a success so far. As for free will – I suspect this doesn’t really exist. Everything appears to be governed by cause and effect in which case every event is deterministic. If we knew every variable in the universe then we should be able predict every future event. However, at the quantum level there is much that appears chaotic and even events that appear to occur before they are caused. Would these events at the micro level be sufficient to create enough randomness to breakup the long change of deterministic cause/effect sequences that has led me to write this cumbersome sentence? And would knowing that free will really doesn’t exist matter? If it is an illusion it seems so difficult for us to determine that who really cares. As for souls - an interesting fantasy concept not worthy of any serious discussion. All the things that have been claimed as the domain of the soul, e.g. thoughts, emotions, feelings, are all now understood as functions of the brain. As for consciousness and self-awareness - there is no reason to believe that the brain is not also the only and key player in these issues.

The Brain is analog? Are you sure? Each neuron takes a number of inputs from many other neurons and then may or may not fire a pulse to another neuron - that sounds very digital to me. Note that each neuron fires on average 300 times per second. And with 200 billion of them operating in parralel that gives an equivalnet computing power of around 20,000 x 3GHz Intel Pentium processors. The overwhlming reason we haven't come close to mimmicking the brain is that we have yet to put together any type of processing system that powerful. It'll take about another 10-15 years. And there is nothing special about emotions - they are still functions of the brain.

We should achieve human level AI within the next 20 years. One year after that machines will have about double that and humans will no longer be the dominant intelligence on the planet. One of the limitations of AI development has been the lack of adequate computing power, a massive oversight by those back in 1950’s who thought AI was just around the corner. However, computing power has been doubling approximately every 12-18 months quite consistently since the early 1940’s. There is no sign that that progress is slowing and every sign that it is speeding up. This consistent speedup is known as Moore’s law. When will compute power equal the power of the human brain? The human brain consists of approximately 200Billion neurons. Each neuron can be considered a small microprocessor in its own right. It has a set of inputs and single output and has local memory, it also fires at about 300 times per second (300Hz). Instead of thinking of the human brain as a single large computer it is more appropriate to think of it as a massively parallel processing system. Each neuron operates independently and in parallel, and together they form a combined approximate operating frequency of around 60,000GHz, or the approximate equivalent of 20,000 Intel 3GHz processors. If Moore’s law continues to hold then that power should be in the form of a few chips by 2016, or about 10 years from now (2005). That is the easy part. Given that the appropriate computing power will be available we must now turn to the software stack. That is lagging behind mainly because of inadequate power. That will rapidly change as more power comes online and the many functions that now take minutes to perform will now be down to microseconds and will begin to look more like human brain speeds. Be aware that it is unlikely that Moore’s law will simply stop when we achieve equivalent human brain power. Once the basic AI algorithms have been developed then they will experience increasing power on a yearly basis that will far exceed human levels. The human level will be just one milestone towards super-intelligence beyond which it is difficult for us to imagine. By 2020 or shortly after we will probably have to face some interesting choices. We will no longer be in control of our world and intelligent machines will be the dominant species. What they will do with us is an additional interesting question. What I think will happen is that we will choose to join them. I would hope that with such massive compute power available then it should not be difficult to have our own neural networks digitized and uploaded into an appropriate machine brain with all the additional power that that will provide. Within the next century I suspect the human race will cease to exist – we will have evolved into a non-biological super-intelligent species with unlimited lifespans. And with that we will really have a good basis for exploring the rest of the universe.