Taking a step toward a machine that can think

[bemildred]

Last edited Tue Feb 25, 2014, 02:27 PM - Edit history (1)

Jim Gimzewski grabs a silicon wafer with a pair of tweezers and raises it to the light, thinking about Jackson Pollock, snowflakes and Tibetan mandalas.

No bigger than a quarter, the wafer looks like a small circuit board with a dozen or so electrodes converging at a darkened center, which under a microscope is an ugly tangle of wires randomly crisscrossed and interwoven like hairs in a tiny dust ball.

He places it inside a box the size of a mini-fridge. He closes the lid, and one of his graduate students, Henry Sillin, begins to run electricity into the box. A nearby monitor shows a sine-wave. The dust ball, messy and anarchic as it is, has come to life.

Gimzewski is one step closer toward what he calls his final frontier: building a machine that can think.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-ucla-gimzewski-chip-20140225-dto,0,1782140.htmlstory

Edit: posted because this guy has the right idea. For what we call intelligence, as opposed to what we call computing, you need massive parallelism, both in memory/storage and lookup and in problem solving. And those connections have to be grown, if you could specify them in advance, you'd already be able to do "thinking" with von Neumann architectures. Then you have to populate the memory by training. The bigger it is, the more training. And then you may have something that can respond in an instant to "incomplete information" in ways that are very likely to make sense.

[valerief]

1. Can these thinking machines replace our SCOTUS? It would be nice to get thinkers. nt

[Fumesucker]

2. Making humans obsolete

I hope the machines are fond of their creators/pets.

https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological
means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after,
the human era will be ended.

<snip>

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human
intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.
In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve
the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter
time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past:
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster
than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own
simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability
to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can
solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.
Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher
speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human
past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away
of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an
exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that
before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever)
will likely happen in the next century.

[bemildred]

3. Only nine years to go. I may live to see it. nt

[The Stranger]

5. Dumb question (pardon the pun), but why hasn't this already happened

with Big Blue able to out-think and defeat any human in chess?

[blkmusclmachine]

4. We have seen the enemy. It is the human species.