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I love the quote at the end: > In 2014, I attended TED’s main Vancouver conference and watched the opening talk, from the MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negrop

by api 7y ago

I love the quote at the end: > In 2014, I attended TED’s main Vancouver conference and watched the opening talk, from the MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. In his closing words, he claimed that in 30 years, “we are going to ingest information. You’re going to swallow a pill and know English. You’re going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it’s in your bloodstream, it basically goes through it and gets into the brain, and when it knows that it’s in the brain, in the different pieces, it deposits it in the right places.” I'm on the fence about whether people like this are delusional and actually believe that someday we will swallow a pill that can teach us language or whether they're deliberately pumping hype for funding. I lean toward the latter given that this idea is so deeply and thoroughly absurd I can't believe anyone with any knowledge at all of learning, neuroscience, or information theory could possibly believe it. It's much more ridiculous than the "water memory" claim around homeopathy given that the amount of information we'd be talking about here is orders of magnitude beyond what one might imagine a homeopathic cure would need to convey (assuming homeopathy worked).

f00zz 7y ago
I highly recommend Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for many predictions like these, with a detailed timeline. According to him, being able to simulate human-level intelligence on a computer is simple matter of having enough processing power, which he estimates at 20 petaflops. He also predicts we'd be able to buy 20 petaflops for US$ 1k around 2009, IIRC. (Edit: had to check - he actually wrote 2020. Looking forward to it.) (It's a fun book though, I like it. Except for the creepy bits on cybersex.)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  That sounds like a classic example of assuming a sigmoid curve is purely exponential.
- thr2131adf 7y ago
  > is simple matter of having enough processing power Isn't this provably false though ? I don't think the openworm project has gotten anywhere near simulating C.elegans.
- taneq 7y ago
  > According to him, being able to simulate human-level intelligence on a computer is simple matter of having enough processing power I've never understood this argument. It seems about as logical as claiming that the human brain uses about 20 watts of power and so if we can make a computer use 20 watts, it'll become conscious.

by api 7y ago

f00zz 7y ago

I highly recommend Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for many predictions like these, with a detailed timeline. According to him, being able to simulate human-level intelligence on a computer is simple matter of having enough processing power, which he estimates at 20 petaflops. He also predicts we'd be able to buy 20 petaflops for US$ 1k around 2009, IIRC. (Edit: had to check - he actually wrote 2020. Looking forward to it.) (It's a fun book though, I like it. Except for the creepy bits on cybersex.)

perl4ever 7y ago
That sounds like a classic example of assuming a sigmoid curve is purely exponential.
thr2131adf 7y ago
> is simple matter of having enough processing power Isn't this provably false though ? I don't think the openworm project has gotten anywhere near simulating C.elegans.
taneq 7y ago
> According to him, being able to simulate human-level intelligence on a computer is simple matter of having enough processing power I've never understood this argument. It seems about as logical as claiming that the human brain uses about 20 watts of power and so if we can make a computer use 20 watts, it'll become conscious.