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>> Brains take 2+ years of constant training before they start to do much of anything we would associate with strong AI, and another 10 or so years of constant training before they can do anything worth spending money on. I'm not sure how you call that "very few examples".

You're talking about human brains. The brains of, say, gazelles, are ready for surviving in an extremely hostile environment a few minutes after they are born. See for example [1]. Obviously they can't speak or do arithmetic, but they can navigate their surroundings with great competence, find sustenance (even just their mothers' teat) and avoid danger.

That's already far, far beyond the capabilities of current AI and if I could make a system even half that smart I'd be the most famous woman on the planet. Honestly. And also, the richest. And most poweful. Screw Elon Musk and his self-driving cars- I'd rule the world with my giant killer robots of doom :|

Also- "very few examples": that's the whole "poverty of the stimulus" argument. In short, babies learn to speak without ever hearing what we would consider enough language. Noam Chomsky used that to argue for an innate "universal grammar" but there must be at least some learning performed by babies before they learn to speak their native language, and they manage it after hearing only very, very little of it.

Are you saying that brains will eventually be possible to copy with computers? In a thousand years, with completely different computers, maybe. Why not. But with current tech, forget about it.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANGD5cE2WoQ




> The brains of, say, gazelles,

General consensus is that this is hard-wired genetic behavior. It's mildly impressive, but nothing that we think we couldn't do on a computer with enough time and effort.

> In short, babies learn to speak without ever hearing what we would consider enough language.

All known humans who were deprived of social contact during early development were unable to learn speech later on. Babies get a ton of language stimulus; I'm not sure where you're getting "what we would consider enough".

> In a thousand years, with completely different computers, maybe.

We're only a few orders of magnitude off from standard COTS computer equipment being able to match the throughput you would expect from a human brain doing one "useful" thing per neuron at several kHz (which is probably a gross overestimation). Even if we decided to do a full neurophysiological simulation for every neuron in the brain, that only adds a few more orders of magnitude required compute power.

We expect to hit $1/(TFLOP/s) over the next 20 years or so, and there's physically no way the brain is doing more than a (PFLOP/s), unless neurons are doing some insane amount of work at a sub-neuronal level (which, I admit, is possible, but quite unlikely).

I would propose a long-term bet, but I'm not sure what the conditions would be.




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