Carlos Gershenson wrote:
Well, you note, " How the hell do you program a human mind in there??? It takes us several years just to learn to talk!" Part of the answer is, "We just copy the ability from computer to computer". Humans are difficult to clone. Machines much less so. Is it because machines are so much less complex, or that the method nature chose was the best available at the time or that human replication serves other purposes as well not satisfied by an in-depth copy? A bit of all 3. Humans have not evolved terribly quickly, but this model has had relatively long shelf life - much longer than an ENIAC, say. As we digitize data, information and knowledge, it becomes easier to load up a machine with it all. Obviously accessing and integrating this is more important than just having it stored on relatively fast disk, but it's hard to deny that the ability to store tons of knowledge is an advantage. Machines have much faster data transfer internal-to-external. Where humans do seem to win is in internal communications and the software programming. I'm sure as we go to molecular computers we'll pick up some speed on the internal bus bandwidth as well. Not that cognition is all about speed - slow filtering is very useful in places. Regarding the software, well, human development is a little bit stupid. Yes, it takes us years to learn how to talk, and then we spend years learning "Row row row your boat" and other time intensive learn-by-repetition-and-rote tasks just so we can be relatively self-sufficient for 50 years, which means we hold meaningless jobs so we can find time to head to the bar. But our external knowledge and technology cumulate, so in 2016 we'll be able to organize computer knowledge much better than we do know, and presumably as the machines get smarter and smarter, they can play a larger role in programming their descendants. The relevancy of Google answers is much better than we had 10 years ago, in a large part due to comingling requests and answers over millions of nodes and requests, as well as the algorithms that go into the responses. Where will this approach be in 10 years? What new insights, what new applications? Computers will be more capable of aggregating insights from a billion more nodes and applying the insights to new problems. While humans are getting better at programming the ability to have these insights, we are not getting much better at having the insights ourselves. Our creative thinking more and more depends on the machine for its completion. That doesn't mean all computer questions are tackled with ease. There were big linguistics/ machine learning setbacks in the 1980's, AI was overhyped, etc. But these efforts don't so much disappear as they recur as technological and societal environments become more prepared to utilize them. Whether this all leads to a singularity followed by the Cyberiad, or simply continues as a long-term symbiotic relationship (man and dog, computer and man), I don't know - I favor the latter. But not because we can't program, only that the relationship will continue to evolve in ways we find useful, and we've already made great progress on what we'd like machines to do even in the short span of computer science. I don't expect a single algorithm or insight to change everything - I imagine there will be a number of evolving, slightly incompatible approaches, from which a few will gain sway and slowly be replaced. In any case, just because software evolution has historically gone slower than hardware, I don't think it's inherent in programming that that has to be true forever. For one thing, we've used hardware as stable datum - program new tasks, but leave the hardware design consistent and backwards compatible. So while the goal of the hardware is higher performance/efficiency, software has to have better performance and more features. And attempts to improve automatic programming have had poor results. But the state of programming is much improved over 1991, and my guess is that it's only a matter of time before all of our efforts in different approaches hit something that pays off more exponentially. Okay, I didn't address the one question - if you copy my mind out to disk and back into another body, will it have identity as "Bill", self-knowledge, consciousness, etc.? I think Lem answered that in the Cyberiad, but I'll have to re-read it, I don't store data that well. |
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