I would love to read more about how software can emulate a human brain. The human brain is an analog system down the molecular level. The brain is a giant soup with a delicate balance of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. There thousands of different kinds of neurons in the brain, each one acts a little different. As a programmer, I cannot imagine how to faithfully model something like that directly. Digital computers seem completely inadequate. I would guess you’d have more luck wiring together 1000 monkey brains.
If you are curious about brain emulation specifically, FHI’s 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap is still good reading. AI doesn’t specifically try to emulate the brain, though. E.g. vision models in machine learning have ended up sharing some similarities with the human visual system without having tried to directly copy it and instead focusing just on “how to learn useful models from this data”.
I think the point is more like, if you believe that the brain could in theory be emulated, with infinite computation(no souls or mysterious stuff of consciousness), then it seems plausible that the brain is not the most efficient conscious general intelligence. Among the general space of general intelligences, there are probably some designs that are much simpler than the brain. Then the problem becomes that while building AI, we don’t know if we’ve hit one of those super simple designs, and suddenly have a general intelligence in our hands(and soon out of our hands). And as the AIs we build get better and more complex, we get closer to whatever the threshold is for the minimum amount of computation necessary for a general intelligence.
Q3 Technology scale
I would love to read more about how software can emulate a human brain. The human brain is an analog system down the molecular level. The brain is a giant soup with a delicate balance of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. There thousands of different kinds of neurons in the brain, each one acts a little different. As a programmer, I cannot imagine how to faithfully model something like that directly. Digital computers seem completely inadequate. I would guess you’d have more luck wiring together 1000 monkey brains.
If you are curious about brain emulation specifically, FHI’s 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap is still good reading. AI doesn’t specifically try to emulate the brain, though. E.g. vision models in machine learning have ended up sharing some similarities with the human visual system without having tried to directly copy it and instead focusing just on “how to learn useful models from this data”.
I think the point is more like, if you believe that the brain could in theory be emulated, with infinite computation(no souls or mysterious stuff of consciousness), then it seems plausible that the brain is not the most efficient conscious general intelligence. Among the general space of general intelligences, there are probably some designs that are much simpler than the brain. Then the problem becomes that while building AI, we don’t know if we’ve hit one of those super simple designs, and suddenly have a general intelligence in our hands(and soon out of our hands). And as the AIs we build get better and more complex, we get closer to whatever the threshold is for the minimum amount of computation necessary for a general intelligence.