6 ms·

Since when is silicon a poor substrate? Signals travel through silicon 2 million times faster than neurons. Transistors are currently approaching the limit of h

Since when is silicon a poor substrate? Signals travel through silicon 2 million times faster than neurons. Transistors are currently approaching the limit of how small you can build things with atoms, while neurons and synapses are relatively large scale structures. The main limitation is that we currently build silicon on a flat 2d plane and don't take advantage of all of 3d space.

09094920394314 9y ago
And lack of neural plasticity And power leakage And overheating And no self repair First and last one are the most pertinent here, but there is probably more I can't think of of the top of my head
- chongli 9y ago
  Another one that annoys me: memory is on the wrong end of the bus! The brain would be terrible at inference if all the memories were stored in the ass. Instead, the brain has the correct design: keep all the data where the processing happens and stick IO out on the bus.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    That's a limitation of general purpose computers, not silicon itself. People do build ASICs with memory stored near where it is needed.
- Sharlin 9y ago
  Neural plasticity is just an artifact of the brain not making a distinction between software and hardware. Any general-purpose digital computer has infinite "plasticity", being able to execute any program that can exist (modulo memory limitations).
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    But computers can't build themselves, nor can they repair themselves.
    - the8472 9y ago
      neither can cars, but that doesn't stop cars from outperforming humans by some carefully chosen success criteria. Nobody is going to measure silicon chips by their ability to self-replicate without external facilities. Your typical doomsday AI could just order more compute substrate from TSMC to take over the world. Which is in fact more or less what happens in TFA.
trevyn 9y ago
Ah, ok, this is a good point. I should say current silicon lithography and manufacturing techniques -- maybe you could build something brain-esque if you could manufacture a "chip" with logic of and in roughly the volume of a brain, but this wouldn't be very practical with anything like today's manufacturing techniques. So I guess that does give us a direction.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
The brain absolutely SMOKES current computers at pattern recognition and task flexibility on a op/watt basis. If you look at alpha go, there's ~4-5 order of magnitude difference between the energy requirements of the human and the machine. In terms of chip technology, we're near the limits of lithography, and we can't just scale into 3 dimensions because one of the limiting factors is heat dissipation. We're not going to outperform humans on equal footing without a radically different computing architecture than we currently use.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  Don't know about you but I find that comforting. Personally, I'm not into ML or other AI tech. My opinion is that a pocket calculator is an immensely useful thing since it assists humans at what they aren't great at. At the same time, I have my reservations about sentiment analysis or whatever ML is used for in advertisement, and also about intelligent voice assistants (Ok Google, Siri, Alexa and Co.) and chatbot-like AIs since they don't provide essential value to me, but leave an uncomfortable impression of mocking human behavior. OTOH, my conservative views don't help "advancement of humanity" (sorry about pompousness) in the very long term. I believe humanity will need to genetically re-engineer themselves and use hybrid/cyborg implants to "conquer" the universe, a place where our evolutionary gifts are no longer necessary.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    Our evolutionary gift isn't intelligence, it's adaptability. We are by far the most adaptable species on the planet. The big brain is just one of the mechanisms we use to achieve it. That is never going to stop being useful. I don't think two way implants are ever going to be a "thing" the way they're portrayed in fiction. Every brain is so different that it would have to be wired completely differently in each case. On the other hand, one way implants that allow a computer to "read" your mind are totally feasible and will definitely happen in our lifetimes. I doubt the resolution will get good enough that they'll be super useful for regular people, but they may help disabled people, and they'll create a much shorter feedback loop between man and machine that will be useful for specific tasks.
- 9y ago

09094920394314 9y ago

And lack of neural plasticity And power leakage And overheating And no self repair First and last one are the most pertinent here, but there is probably more I can't think of of the top of my head

chongli 9y ago
Another one that annoys me: memory is on the wrong end of the bus! The brain would be terrible at inference if all the memories were stored in the ass. Instead, the brain has the correct design: keep all the data where the processing happens and stick IO out on the bus.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  That's a limitation of general purpose computers, not silicon itself. People do build ASICs with memory stored near where it is needed.
Sharlin 9y ago
Neural plasticity is just an artifact of the brain not making a distinction between software and hardware. Any general-purpose digital computer has infinite "plasticity", being able to execute any program that can exist (modulo memory limitations).
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  But computers can't build themselves, nor can they repair themselves.
  - the8472 9y ago
    neither can cars, but that doesn't stop cars from outperforming humans by some carefully chosen success criteria. Nobody is going to measure silicon chips by their ability to self-replicate without external facilities. Your typical doomsday AI could just order more compute substrate from TSMC to take over the world. Which is in fact more or less what happens in TFA.

trevyn 9y ago

Ah, ok, this is a good point. I should say current silicon lithography and manufacturing techniques -- maybe you could build something brain-esque if you could manufacture a "chip" with logic of and in roughly the volume of a brain, but this wouldn't be very practical with anything like today's manufacturing techniques. So I guess that does give us a direction.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

The brain absolutely SMOKES current computers at pattern recognition and task flexibility on a op/watt basis. If you look at alpha go, there's ~4-5 order of magnitude difference between the energy requirements of the human and the machine. In terms of chip technology, we're near the limits of lithography, and we can't just scale into 3 dimensions because one of the limiting factors is heat dissipation. We're not going to outperform humans on equal footing without a radically different computing architecture than we currently use.

tannhaeuser 9y ago
Don't know about you but I find that comforting. Personally, I'm not into ML or other AI tech. My opinion is that a pocket calculator is an immensely useful thing since it assists humans at what they aren't great at. At the same time, I have my reservations about sentiment analysis or whatever ML is used for in advertisement, and also about intelligent voice assistants (Ok Google, Siri, Alexa and Co.) and chatbot-like AIs since they don't provide essential value to me, but leave an uncomfortable impression of mocking human behavior. OTOH, my conservative views don't help "advancement of humanity" (sorry about pompousness) in the very long term. I believe humanity will need to genetically re-engineer themselves and use hybrid/cyborg implants to "conquer" the universe, a place where our evolutionary gifts are no longer necessary.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  Our evolutionary gift isn't intelligence, it's adaptability. We are by far the most adaptable species on the planet. The big brain is just one of the mechanisms we use to achieve it. That is never going to stop being useful. I don't think two way implants are ever going to be a "thing" the way they're portrayed in fiction. Every brain is so different that it would have to be wired completely differently in each case. On the other hand, one way implants that allow a computer to "read" your mind are totally feasible and will definitely happen in our lifetimes. I doubt the resolution will get good enough that they'll be super useful for regular people, but they may help disabled people, and they'll create a much shorter feedback loop between man and machine that will be useful for specific tasks.
9y ago