Re: Recycling/AI and super human computers

[KellySt@aol.com]

RE: T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)
> 
> Reply to Kelly:
> 
> >Current indications are that it will accelerate.  Given that we are
assuming
> >a large space infastructure to build the ship, that would give us all
access
> >to VAST raw material resouces and wealth.
> 
> Growth is not necessary acceleration, besides that the gain for the public
> is not always that much. Since the arrival of the televisions, they haven't
> changed significantly: 30 years ago there was color tv and now they still
> is. It's a bit more rectangular and has a little bit more quality but those
> are no real gains. Medical care has grown about as fast as technology but
> now that we have removed a lot of diseases, it is not growing that fast.
> Maybe there will come a new acceleration after the genome project, but
after
> a while that will slow down too.
> All in all, it will become harder and harder to find new bases to
accelerate
> from and after a while (few centuries) most will not accelerate anymore.

???!!  TV's have changed dramatically in the last thirty years.  Not the
picture format, which is fixed by law, but the image clarity and relyability
is far better.  That of course ignores the fact that current TV's are about
to be phased out for digital HDTV's (at least in the states).

Medical gains are also accelerating, not declining.  Infectious deseases
unfortunatly are also ready for a comback.

Virtually all major feilds from industrial architecture, computers,
industrial manufacture, chemistry, aviation, farming, have all seen dramatic
improvements.  Theses improvements don't always do something obvious, but
they are there.

> >> Again, it depends on the gain. These days, many people decide to live
from
> >> social finances and not to work and earn more money.
> >
> >True but the welfare is so generous (if you don't mind sucking up to a
> >burecrate dweeb) that the people on welfare (generally lower inteligence
and
> >education) would be hard pressed to find a better paying job.
> 
> What happens if the jobs available are to difficult for less 
> intelligent people.  After a while machines and AI will take 
> over a lot of work. And if AI really become smarter than we 
> are, then all the work we do would be superfluous.

If the less intelegent can't find any job left at their skill level (or
atleast not enough for all), they will eiather have to improve their
abilities, or expect to be droped out of society.  Sooner or later people get
feed up with others living off them for no good reason.  

As for us and super intelegent AI's.  Eiather we'll find something to do
together (or co-evolve), or they will move on and ignore us. (We can hardly
expect them to take care of us forever.)

> >> I remember that the human brain has E20 neurons. But it is not
especially
> >> the memory but the the connection between them, all have to be parallel.
> >
> >The latest issue of ANALOG science fact/science fiction has an artical on
> >current and future computer and nano-tech systems.  We alread have built
> >computers with more processing power, data flow, and memory capacity then
the
> >human brain.  (As long as the total data flow rate is as great with a
> >non-paralell system, it will work.  Now if we could just tell it what to
do!)
> > In 20-30 years a 1 human equivelent system should cost what a good home
> >computer costs now.  Should help A.I. research quite a bit. ;)
> 
> I find it hard to believe, the GRAY C916 computer has a memory of 16Gb and
a
> computing speed of 16 GFLOPSs. Its I/O bandwith is 13.6 Gb/sec.
> (It uses a maximum of 3.5E5 Watt, not something you want in your house)
> The amount of bytes is many orders smaller than the amount of neurons of a
> human brain (assuming a neuron has about 256 states). As you can see, the
> GRAY can recall all it's memory in about 1 sec, but than it doesn't do any
> calculations, which are necessary to make any sense in a neural-network.
> 
> Further more a few years ago the biggest neural network was 1E5 neurons and
> they had a hard time of getting them to work together. A fly has a brain of
> 1E12 neurons (hope I'm right) so it's a long (but not impossible) way to
> human AI.
> 
> Timothy

Its Cray not Gray.

Best current bet is that the human brain has E10 Neurons and can process the
equivelent of E14 bits per second.  Rough guess at computing power 1 teraflop
(one trillion floating point calculations per secound).  


The biggest computer I know of personally is a 4-5 tera byte (E12 byte
system) being constructed in my old neighborhood in Reston Virgina for the
phone companies cable TV experement.  The Cray corporation is building a 9
teraflop system for the US government DARPA research agency (completion
scheduled for 1998), and their competitor (thinking machines) is offering a 2
teraflop system comercially for $100 million. 

So we already are building systems bigger and more powerfull than the human
brain, we just don't really know how to make them think.  True intelegence
may require custom circutry.  But that circutry could be built in a way
similar to the current circuts.  If of course it does need couston circuts,
which is hotly debated.

Kelly