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mwengler comments on What if Strong AI is just not possible? - Less Wrong Discussion
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birds fly after millions of years we have rocket ships and supersonic planes after decades. horses run at tens of mph we have wheeled vehicles doing hundreds of mph after decades.
Absolutely not an existence proof, but evolution appears to have concentrated on gooey carbon and left multi order of magnitude performance gaps in technologies involving other materials in all sorts of areas. The expectation would be that there is nothing magical about either goo or the limits evolution has so far found when considering intelligence.
Indeed, silicon computers are WAY better than human brains as adding machines, doing megaflops and kiloflops with great accuracy from a very early development point, where humans could do only much slower computation. Analagous to what we have done with high speed in ground and flight i would say.
Comparing megaflops performed by the silicon hardware with symbolic operation by the human brain is comparing apples and oranges. If you measure the number of additions and multiplications performed by the neurons (yes, less precise but more fault tolerant) you will arrive at a much higher number of flops. Think about mental addition more like editing a spreadsheet cell. That includes lots of operation related to updating, display, IO, ... and the addition itself is an insignicant part of it. Same if you juggle number which actually represent anything in your head. The representing is the hard part. Not the arithmetic itself.
You can see the teraflops of the human brain at work if you consider the visual cortex where it is easy to compare and amp the image transforms to well known operations (at least for the first processing stages).
OK like comparing apples and oranges. We wind up with apples AND oranges through similar mechanisms ni carbon and oxygen after 100s of millions of years of evolution, but we seriously consider we can't get there with design in silicon after less than 100 years of trying while watching the quality of our tools for getting there doubling every 5 years or so?
I'm not saying it HAS to happen. I'm just saying the smart bet is not against it happening.
I didn't say that conscious AI isn't possible. Not the least. I just said that that your argument wasn't sound.