7 ms·

Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together

Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. You're watching a two-year old. It's interesting to think about what it will be like when it's ten, sure. But what will really blow your mind is what it'll be like when it's 23. This is happening right now, before our eyes. I cannot overemphasize that any large server farm at Google or Amazon is doing more, and much faster, processing than a human brain's neural net. Human brain is 86 billion neurons with an average of 7,000 synaptic connections each. That is a huge number. But they are firing at 15-300 herz (because they're at biological speed, instead of lightspeed like our CPU's) - which is 7 orders of magnitude slower than our silocon. Our brain is about 3 pounds (1,300-1,400 g) and uses some 20 watts. It's not a question of "if" a server farm will have as powerful neural nets. It's a question of "when". (Also although we won't be using it, the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed.) Guys, we are at an incredible pivot point in human history. We are coming up with computerized brains with in some ways comparable architecture to humans, and they are doing human activities. Today, in 2016, there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of server rooms all over the world that have more than enough computational power to do in real-time what a human adult brain does in real time - but we lack the software. when we see advances like this in artificial intelligence, this is scary. We're all but looking at the intellectual output of a two year-old in the field of music. every single day AI results are astounding. this is it.

ythn 10y ago
> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  You sound like some of the kids I teach. All 17 - 18 year old kids have phones and check them at least every 5 minutes. I mentioned that it'll be weird when they are wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses and teachers won't be able to tell if students are concentrating or reading reddit. The kids all said "That'll never happen." as if technology is stuck where we are today. They were astounded when I told them that ten years ago, I never saw a phone in a classroom. So from my perspective we went from no phones, to big phones, to little dumb phones, to little connected computers... it's no stretch to think that soon they will be glasses mounted or project some sort of holograph into the eyeball. Version 2 of Microsoft HoloLens will be cool, v3 will be tiny, v4 will be mounted inside glasses for sure. The same with AI. A few years ago I couldn't talk to my computer. Today I do it all the time. Last week I had to remember passwords, today my computer recognises me and logs me in. AI is here and it's getting better and from my point of view it is getting better much faster.
  - ythn 10y ago
    It's one thing to say "VR will be commonplace in 10 years" or "Self driving cars will be commonplace in 10 years". That, I can believe because we already have prototypes and I've messed with them and could imagine advancing them. It is quite another thing to claim that human adult level strong AI is coming "very very soon" and could happen overnight. The latter is just science fiction wishful thinking. I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers, let alone "very very soon." Sure, our Siris and Alexas and whatnot will get better and better at responding to our queries how we want, but that's way different from an adult level human intelligence AI. Machine Learning has limits and will not yield conscious machines anytime soon, if ever.
    - naasking 10y ago
      > I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers Unless you think human brains work on magical pixie dust, I'd say you have quite a few reasons.
d33 10y ago
> the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed Actually those 700MB are compressed, in a way so sophisticated that we don't really know how to uncompress it yet - or whether it's even possible without the external resources our planet provides. And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture.
- logicallee 10y ago
  What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever compression algorithm you wanted. But don't take my word for it: >"When the 4 bases are packed into one byte ( .2bit format) the size is 770M (hg18.2bit) , but you'll need an extra tool to decypher the data." [1] 2. You raise an important point: >And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture. Yes, absolutely. I simply called it an upper bound on how complex a brain's architecture could be. DNA obviously encodes the brain's architecture, since humans all have human brains. Beyond that, there is a very large variation in people's mental capabilities and brains, and the largest variation of all comes from culture. But culture could be given to a virtualized brain (called training). Bear in mind that when human brains receive culture, it takes them years of all-day training before they're even able to speak. So full 1x human brains take a long time to train. When you see results out of neural nets that are similar to what very young toddlers can do, you should be awed. We have the computational power in server farms to do what full brains do -- if not now, then soon. This isn't some sci-fi pipe dream. Go ahead and look at the facts. [1] https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/ https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/
  - wvyar 10y ago
    I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
mdpopescu 10y ago
> uses some 20 watts Daniel Lemire has an observation here: our brains don't use all the connections, all the time (when it does it's called epilepsy); it would be interesting if we built some computers that also worked like that - with only small parts being active at a certain time, but switching quickly from one to another. That would help with the heating problem and it might allow processors a lot more complex than we have now.
- logicallee 10y ago
  if you're trying to achieve parity with human brain calculation the most important thing is how slow neural connections are. they're snail-paced compared with gigabit links and CPU's @ 3 Ghz+. There's quite a lot of memory that is needed but if you're allowed to make a million round-trips across the room before you miss your realtime deadline, it's kind of silly to think that it won't happen. The fact you point out (about not all parts firing at once) could be useful because it might result in these links not being saturated by data anyway.
- gugagore 10y ago
  From my understanding, this is already present in modern architectures and systems, and will keep increasing . Instead of building only general-purpose circuits (e.g. something like a CPU), you can build lots of special-purpose circuits (multipliers, CRC, FFT, AES, hashing, h.264,...).
EGreg 10y ago
By your own argument, any program that a single human being can write can also contain only 700MB of source code, including graphics and videos etc, which is obviously not true.
- logicallee 10y ago
  you are right, I went too far. but the size of DNA is a good indication of how complex the high-level wiring and topology of neurons likely is, that is, until that neural net has been been trained at all. it takes years to train a human neural net to even been able to speak (toddlers.) But regarding the architecture, there's good reason to think that the wiring for it is not infinitely complex, taking trillions of terabytes etc - or anywhere close to that. I think that on some level it is fair to say that the wiring that makes people's brains human is in some sense encoded in DNA. However, I will grant that this might not be helpful. After all, if we posit or assume as axiomatic that the whole universe is deterministic and here, these 100 megabytes of source code can model it and if you did that with 10^100 bytes and FLOPS, you'd after a few days of running it you'd find humans inside - well, then, sure, in some sense 100 megabytes "describes" the entropy inside human brains, but in another sense that is not useful in any way. so perhaps DNA is the same and the "knowledge" that 700 MB or so can produce a human if you run it in biological substrate after carrying it out in a womb, and then raise it with human culture for 72 months it will speak just fine, is not necessarily an indication of what kind of information we would need to give a neural net and how much coding it would take to take on the same behavior. So while to me personally it remains an indication, I agree I went too far.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    I honestly disagree. Because in that case any evolution of anything would be impossible. Take a look at Wolfram's New Kind of Science for an analysis of how massive complexity arises from simple beginnings. I will go further and tell you thay the state of AI so far is nowhere as advanced as you think. It is not a flexible intelligence that can figure out connections between concepts (look up Cyc for the closest we've got). It's PARAMETRIC MODELS made by HUMANS where a neural net simply runs an algorithm written by HUMANS to optimize something. It's just an optimization problem. You know where all the ingenuity and progressin machines comes from currently? The ability to make PERFECT COPIES AND SEARCH QUICKLY. You see, learning takes a long time and imperfectly copies information. Books could be copied but search is slow. Now with computers we can try algorithms out and the ones that work better are SELECTED FOR AND COPIED and anyone around the world can contribute. That is also why open source outcompetes closed solutions. You will find that the huge innovation in technology and software from 40s and 50s til now has all been because HUMANS added to the snowball and replicated good ideas. The ideas themselves require HUMANS to generate new ideas. Show me one AI today that can form connections between concepts to teach itself to solve arbitrary problems, instead of just optimizing some parametric pattern recognizer.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? In a sense, that's expected, and it's a (perhaps weak) indication that we're moving in the right direction. > You're watching a two-year old. It's interesting to think about what it will be like when it's ten, sure. But what will really blow your mind is what it'll be like when it's 23. Or 23000. Because, you know, it's a machine. > the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed I have this half-baked argument sloshing around in my mind for a while now, that the total source code is greater than that, because it also includes constants, rules, and facts built into the fabric of the Universe itself. In other words, that 700 MB is code for "build a carbon-based intelligence in the context of such-and-such universe" - where "such-and-such" may turn out to be a surprisingly long and intricate description, effectively extending the code by a large amount. Kind of like a fixed ROM added to the variable NVRAM of all humans. In a different universe the same code will produce a very different creature - and that's at best. In most other universes, the process would terminate early with a critical error, or would not even start. Or would not even make sense at all. > we are at an incredible pivot point in human history I think we are at the cusp of an explosive change without precedent in the history of the Earth - and not just due to AI. There's a long list of things that are about to hit tipping points in the next years / few decades. It will be... "interesting". Buckle up.
- phs318u 10y ago
  > Or 23000. Because, you know, it's a machine. Deep Thought[1] instantly came to mind. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/deepthought.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/deepthought.shtm...
zeveb 10y ago
> Also although we won't be using it, the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed. There's also the training set consisting of all sensory and chemical inputs from conception on. I think it's fair to say that the former inputs are only sensible to an organism with the same sensory organs, and the latter inputs are only sensible to an organism with the same physical structure & organs as we have. I don't think a silicon neural net with the neurons of a human being would be the same thing after two dozen years of training as a human being after 24. You're also assuming that there's nothing more to a mind than its neurons.

ythn 10y ago

> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
You sound like some of the kids I teach. All 17 - 18 year old kids have phones and check them at least every 5 minutes. I mentioned that it'll be weird when they are wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses and teachers won't be able to tell if students are concentrating or reading reddit. The kids all said "That'll never happen." as if technology is stuck where we are today. They were astounded when I told them that ten years ago, I never saw a phone in a classroom. So from my perspective we went from no phones, to big phones, to little dumb phones, to little connected computers... it's no stretch to think that soon they will be glasses mounted or project some sort of holograph into the eyeball. Version 2 of Microsoft HoloLens will be cool, v3 will be tiny, v4 will be mounted inside glasses for sure. The same with AI. A few years ago I couldn't talk to my computer. Today I do it all the time. Last week I had to remember passwords, today my computer recognises me and logs me in. AI is here and it's getting better and from my point of view it is getting better much faster.
- ythn 10y ago
  It's one thing to say "VR will be commonplace in 10 years" or "Self driving cars will be commonplace in 10 years". That, I can believe because we already have prototypes and I've messed with them and could imagine advancing them. It is quite another thing to claim that human adult level strong AI is coming "very very soon" and could happen overnight. The latter is just science fiction wishful thinking. I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers, let alone "very very soon." Sure, our Siris and Alexas and whatnot will get better and better at responding to our queries how we want, but that's way different from an adult level human intelligence AI. Machine Learning has limits and will not yield conscious machines anytime soon, if ever.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers Unless you think human brains work on magical pixie dust, I'd say you have quite a few reasons.

d33 10y ago

> the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed Actually those 700MB are compressed, in a way so sophisticated that we don't really know how to uncompress it yet - or whether it's even possible without the external resources our planet provides. And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture.

logicallee 10y ago
What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever compression algorithm you wanted. But don't take my word for it: >"When the 4 bases are packed into one byte ( .2bit format) the size is 770M (hg18.2bit) , but you'll need an extra tool to decypher the data." [1] 2. You raise an important point: >And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture. Yes, absolutely. I simply called it an upper bound on how complex a brain's architecture could be. DNA obviously encodes the brain's architecture, since humans all have human brains. Beyond that, there is a very large variation in people's mental capabilities and brains, and the largest variation of all comes from culture. But culture could be given to a virtualized brain (called training). Bear in mind that when human brains receive culture, it takes them years of all-day training before they're even able to speak. So full 1x human brains take a long time to train. When you see results out of neural nets that are similar to what very young toddlers can do, you should be awed. We have the computational power in server farms to do what full brains do -- if not now, then soon. This isn't some sci-fi pipe dream. Go ahead and look at the facts. [1] https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/ https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/
- wvyar 10y ago
  I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.

mdpopescu 10y ago

> uses some 20 watts Daniel Lemire has an observation here: our brains don't use all the connections, all the time (when it does it's called epilepsy); it would be interesting if we built some computers that also worked like that - with only small parts being active at a certain time, but switching quickly from one to another. That would help with the heating problem and it might allow processors a lot more complex than we have now.

logicallee 10y ago
if you're trying to achieve parity with human brain calculation the most important thing is how slow neural connections are. they're snail-paced compared with gigabit links and CPU's @ 3 Ghz+. There's quite a lot of memory that is needed but if you're allowed to make a million round-trips across the room before you miss your realtime deadline, it's kind of silly to think that it won't happen. The fact you point out (about not all parts firing at once) could be useful because it might result in these links not being saturated by data anyway.
gugagore 10y ago
From my understanding, this is already present in modern architectures and systems, and will keep increasing . Instead of building only general-purpose circuits (e.g. something like a CPU), you can build lots of special-purpose circuits (multipliers, CRC, FFT, AES, hashing, h.264,...).

EGreg 10y ago

By your own argument, any program that a single human being can write can also contain only 700MB of source code, including graphics and videos etc, which is obviously not true.

logicallee 10y ago
you are right, I went too far. but the size of DNA is a good indication of how complex the high-level wiring and topology of neurons likely is, that is, until that neural net has been been trained at all. it takes years to train a human neural net to even been able to speak (toddlers.) But regarding the architecture, there's good reason to think that the wiring for it is not infinitely complex, taking trillions of terabytes etc - or anywhere close to that. I think that on some level it is fair to say that the wiring that makes people's brains human is in some sense encoded in DNA. However, I will grant that this might not be helpful. After all, if we posit or assume as axiomatic that the whole universe is deterministic and here, these 100 megabytes of source code can model it and if you did that with 10^100 bytes and FLOPS, you'd after a few days of running it you'd find humans inside - well, then, sure, in some sense 100 megabytes "describes" the entropy inside human brains, but in another sense that is not useful in any way. so perhaps DNA is the same and the "knowledge" that 700 MB or so can produce a human if you run it in biological substrate after carrying it out in a womb, and then raise it with human culture for 72 months it will speak just fine, is not necessarily an indication of what kind of information we would need to give a neural net and how much coding it would take to take on the same behavior. So while to me personally it remains an indication, I agree I went too far.
- EGreg 10y ago
  I honestly disagree. Because in that case any evolution of anything would be impossible. Take a look at Wolfram's New Kind of Science for an analysis of how massive complexity arises from simple beginnings. I will go further and tell you thay the state of AI so far is nowhere as advanced as you think. It is not a flexible intelligence that can figure out connections between concepts (look up Cyc for the closest we've got). It's PARAMETRIC MODELS made by HUMANS where a neural net simply runs an algorithm written by HUMANS to optimize something. It's just an optimization problem. You know where all the ingenuity and progressin machines comes from currently? The ability to make PERFECT COPIES AND SEARCH QUICKLY. You see, learning takes a long time and imperfectly copies information. Books could be copied but search is slow. Now with computers we can try algorithms out and the ones that work better are SELECTED FOR AND COPIED and anyone around the world can contribute. That is also why open source outcompetes closed solutions. You will find that the huge innovation in technology and software from 40s and 50s til now has all been because HUMANS added to the snowball and replicated good ideas. The ideas themselves require HUMANS to generate new ideas. Show me one AI today that can form connections between concepts to teach itself to solve arbitrary problems, instead of just optimizing some parametric pattern recognizer.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? In a sense, that's expected, and it's a (perhaps weak) indication that we're moving in the right direction. > You're watching a two-year old. It's interesting to think about what it will be like when it's ten, sure. But what will really blow your mind is what it'll be like when it's 23. Or 23000. Because, you know, it's a machine. > the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed I have this half-baked argument sloshing around in my mind for a while now, that the total source code is greater than that, because it also includes constants, rules, and facts built into the fabric of the Universe itself. In other words, that 700 MB is code for "build a carbon-based intelligence in the context of such-and-such universe" - where "such-and-such" may turn out to be a surprisingly long and intricate description, effectively extending the code by a large amount. Kind of like a fixed ROM added to the variable NVRAM of all humans. In a different universe the same code will produce a very different creature - and that's at best. In most other universes, the process would terminate early with a critical error, or would not even start. Or would not even make sense at all. > we are at an incredible pivot point in human history I think we are at the cusp of an explosive change without precedent in the history of the Earth - and not just due to AI. There's a long list of things that are about to hit tipping points in the next years / few decades. It will be... "interesting". Buckle up.

phs318u 10y ago
> Or 23000. Because, you know, it's a machine. Deep Thought[1] instantly came to mind. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/deepthought.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/deepthought.shtm...

zeveb 10y ago

> Also although we won't be using it, the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed. There's also the training set consisting of all sensory and chemical inputs from conception on. I think it's fair to say that the former inputs are only sensible to an organism with the same sensory organs, and the latter inputs are only sensible to an organism with the same physical structure & organs as we have. I don't think a silicon neural net with the neurons of a human being would be the same thing after two dozen years of training as a human being after 24. You're also assuming that there's nothing more to a mind than its neurons.