My buddy Stuart recently sent me this video. It's an interesting collection of facts. I was thinking about this today as I went to workout at our club. I nodded hello to the guy who was picking up towels. I realized that he's been working at the club since we joined back in 2003. During that time, I've had 4 different jobs. It must be strange to have the same job for a very long time.
Towards the end of the video there are some quotes which I'm sure come from Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Basically the idea is that computing power is going to rival that of the human brain in a few years. And in a few decades, it will rival that of the entire human race. In the second video below, you can watch a recent Bill Gates lecture from Carnegie Mellon University. During the lecture he excerpts a talk from some Harvard researchers who are scanning in a mouse brain as a way of trying to get a handle on how our brains actually work. I think this is how we'll actually get some traction on doing real AI, simply by copying nature. We'll probably get a lot of mileage out copying nature, before we get even an inkling of how brains actually work.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Shift Happens
