 12-21-2003, 02:27 PM | #1 |
| Administrator Join Date: Dec 2003 Posts: 134 | Cooperating with AI
Quote: A quick glance at www.top500.org lets us take a look at the current processing speeds of the fastest present-day computers. The clock speeds of many of these machines are rapidly approaching the computing power of the human brain. A common estimate for the human brain's processing power is 75 Terraops, but neuroscience evidence suggests that this is an overestimate. The majority of writers on the topic overestimate in order to avoid criticism for commenting on what is already a radical, possibly uncomfortable idea.
The interesting thing about true AI, however, is that it wouldn't necessarily need all the processing power of a human brain. Evolution, being a blind process constrained by the mechanics of DNA, incremental changes, the need for an immediate adaptive advantage, and so on, falls far short of the efficiency of human engineers. Programmers, rather than implementing massive clusters of virtual neurons, will simply create programs that roughly duplicate the functionality of entire modules, perhaps even linking these modules together in different ways than evolution could have ever implemented. Gigahertz processors will facilitate thinking speeds far more rapid than the 200Hz speed of our neurons, and metacomputing or massive parallelism will allow the threshold quantity of processing power to be reached far before 75 Terraop supercomputers are actually available to AI researchers. | Read more... http://physicspost.com/articles.php?articleId=84 |
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