h a l f b a k e r yYeah, I wish it made more sense too.
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It is felt by some futurists that an AI with the generalizing abilities of a person would, having access to the whole internet and a capacity for both human (generalized, imprecise thought) and machine (fast math, fast logic, fast knowledge-searching, excellent memory, broad knowledge) intelligence could
design a better unit like itself, which could design a better unit like itself(2) and so forth. This is theorized to be the dawn of a new utopian era, as knowledgable and powerful machines devote themselves to the service of mankind.
Strong AI, as it is called, has been beyond the abilities of mankind.
I propose a distributed AI that would be comprised of many wirelessly-networked, ad-hoc machines. If most of the US and Europe had one of these (each person) they could connect and make a world-spanning brain more powerful than a human. The machines would consist of a wireless networking chip, a weak CPU, a power supply, and a little memory. They would be sold for a few dollars each, and marketed thusly: "Own a piece of the future!" The buyer would be expected to plug her unit into the wall and ignore it. (you can add some blinky lights if that would make it sell better)
Each unit would process a hundred neurons, CAD-style, and send the input/output to ajoining machines. Access points to be created at various universities.
Wikipedia: Singularity
http://en.wikipedia...logical_singularity
What the point of smarter-than-human AI is usually called. [jutta, Oct 31 2007]
Emergence indeed
http://www.wired.co...s-hits-drone-fleet/
[theircompetitor, Oct 07 2011]
\\Not a few of a person's brain cells communicate to other cells physically distant\\
http://www.google.c...AQ&biw=1040&bih=753
Pretty. [mouseposture, Oct 07 2011]
More of the same
http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/
[mouseposture, Oct 07 2011]
You probably never heard of
https://en.wikipedi...g/wiki/Mary_Midgley
[pashute, Jun 17 2015]
[link]
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// If most of the US and Europe had one of these (each person) they could connect and make a world-spanning brain more powerful than a human. |
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No, actually, they could not. |
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Transputer networks are an old hat, but we have no clue how to actually run a brain on top of them, or on top of anything else. (Partially because we still don't deeply understand how biological thinking works.) Your vague suggestion is well within what science-fiction authors and computer scientists have been proposing in the last thirty years or so. It wouldn't surprise me if the very idea of distributed computing had taken a clue from the way neurons connect to each other; it's hard to look at those colored cell clusters and not want to try it in hardware. |
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As an aside, once people figure out how to do this, I'm pretty sure it'll be several orders of magnitude easier, faster, cheaper, and more power-efficient in a single computer. |
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Two book recommendations in this context: Charles Stross's "Accelerando" is sci-fi set in and around this singularity event; its characters run into some quirky little problems that made me go "ha!". The other book I'm reading right now is "The Three-Pound Enigma", and intersperses portraits of neuro researchers with an introduction to the biology of the brain. |
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Actually, recently a supercomputer did model a bit of brain using CAD. The researchers found effects like relay-firing similar to the real thing. CAD brain modeling is no longer the realm of science fiction. If you are proposing that a large, flat brain would be less capable than a more compact style you could be right, but that can be worked around by connecting clusters in various places to other clusters in other places. (i.e. hook up some of them far away from each-other using the internet)
The advantage of my proposal is that it can be done with today's technology. Also different from transputers because each cell is not trying to connect to anything thats not close. |
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<checks the 'bakery before going to bed> |
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Hail Degener! Hail Stross! |
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As has been mentioned, [Voice], it's a non-starter. |
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Forgive me for being a little trite, but I remember being told that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are known stars in the sky. However, even if you make the assumption that we do have the computing power to make such an AI beast... If we make it geographically distributed then we have to manage the communications between nodes - that sounds like an exponentially difficult problem, just in terms of node addressing and latency of messages. |
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That brings up the next issue of node topology: since brains are grown, we don't have a very good model topology to recreate - which, in any case, would have to be a logical topology built on top of a physical topology. That's going to be a nightmare to work out. The remodelling of these flat clusters will represent a bottleneck - one that will be unpredictable and likely affect performance significantly. Just imagine if each relay-firing was an IP packet! |
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Then we get to the best bit - we make it wireless. Wireless communications are problematic for many reasons - most of which due to the terrible channel (with reflections, interference, attenuation, fading, and all manner of new ways for errors to creep in to the system). |
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In my opinion, the best thing about this whole idea is the potential for a science-fiction-magic story about mobile phones becoming one distributed sentient intelligence (a la Skynet from the Terminator films). |
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Actually, I think wireless sounds like a
very sensible way to do communication
in a brain-emulator. Brain cells work
on the order of a few hertz or a few
tens of hertz, so communication
needn't be blindingly fast if you're
trying to emulate a brain (in fact, I think
delay may be a crucial part of some of
the brain's functions). You could
therefore afford to waste plenty of
time on encoding the data, and
you'd need fewer wireless channels (eg,
stick an 18-digit prefix on every packet,
and you can address it to one particular
"neuron" out of a billion billion). |
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Having said all that, though, bear in
mind that I have no idea what I'm
talking about. |
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(chorus) we have been found out by Jinbish. Exterminate him. |
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Jinbish, bigsleep, Few of a person's brain-cells actually communicate to other cells physically distant. They talk only to their immediate neighbors, except for the big mess of nerves in the middle. That mess of nerves is a lot of data, true, but nowhere near the communication between individual cells. Each neuron talks to its neighbors. My proposed device connects to its neighbors the same way. |
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As for I/O, universities would have whole clusters of nodes, spread out enough to communicate with the whole thing... |
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//CAD brain modelling isn't Science fiction// Using
open-source software, you can model a single
neuron on a reasonably high-end laptop. The
amount of work to build the model has, in recent
years, dropped below 1.0 doctoral dissertations --
roughly 0.2, and there are public libraries
of already-built models. |
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Well and good. That's the easy part. These
models grossly oversimplify the synapses (points
of connection between neurons), which
greatly outnumber the neurons. But that's still
not the hard part. |
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The area of greatest ignorance is the *pattern* of
synaptic connections between neurons. It is very,
very far from being "nearest-neighbor" or anything
remotely like that, in biological nervous systems. |
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//Few of a person's brain-cells actually
communicate
to other cells physically distant. They talk only to
their immediate neighbors, except for the big
mess
of nerves in the middle.// <link> <link> |
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This is untrue, for example, of cerebellar granule
cells, which
are
the most numerous type of neuron in the brain,
and
constitute almost half the neurons in the
mammalian central nervous system. |
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//The buyer would be expected to plug "Her" unit into the wall and ignore it.//
What is this female Macho sexist crap? |
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And so Millicent took her invention to the market, in so doing, created a race of super computers owned by fat dumb humans, suffering from neurosis of the shiver. |
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<checks the 'bakery before going to bed> |
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Hail Degener! Hail Stross! |
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Sometimes I find what I think is a new idea and amaze myself... |
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Of course there is a cheaper solution. Given mortals use only one half of the brain, right side of brain kicks in for left handed people left side of brain kicks in for right handed people. Knowledge power could quite easily be doubled by only allowing left and right handed people to marry.
Catholic Church scientists experimented with this idea in the middle ages. It was complete and utter failure, every left right marriage only ever produced IrishXFrench children unable to understand a word they were saying to themselves. |
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I think the problem with this is that it lacks many
things, including user motivation. |
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Provide software that implements a networked
algorithm (for instance, a networked neural net)
and some initial behavioural rules. This is run in
the background by anyone who's online with the
software. |
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Let the "players" form (or join) teams, perhaps
with a few thousand or tens of thousands of
computers per team. Each team acts as an
"intelligence". |
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Let the human players challenge and evaluate the
other teams (for instance, by a Turing-style test). |
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Then, add a points system. I suggest a sort of
"share scheme", whereby players can buy into a
given team; the team's share price will be
determined (as for real shares) by a combination
of its performance and market forces. |
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Finally, let the shares be worth real honest
money. |
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The end result is that you have several
competing, distributed evolving AIs, propelled by
human greed, which is surely the best assurance
of success. |
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Why bring computers into the frey of humans being propelled by greed? |
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I'm sorry. I can't do that, Dave. |
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Maybe it's worth buying up a load of old PCs to try
this on.... open the eBay doors, Hal. |
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