Comment by fizixer
8 years ago
I respectfully disagree. Here's is the upper limit to when that will happen (meaning we know for sure it'll happen soon after):
- Complete behavioral reverse engineering of biological neurons, and neuronal clusters.
- Detailed connectome of the mammalian brain, e.g., first that of a mouse, then a cat, and finally that of a human.
- Replication of the above two in functioning electronic form.
Once you have this put in place, it's not hard to see that the subsequent investigation of calibration and testing of such a system, would generate new body of knowledge at an unprecedented rate. We may not immediately convert such a working system into macroscopic behavior resembling its biological counterpart, but it'll happen within a matter of years after that.
What ML/DL/RL folks are doing is only going to hasten this, by eliminating the need to carry out all of the above mentioned steps.
Perhaps, but that's a big if. We can't even say for sure whether a complete reverse-engineering of neurons needs to take quantum effects into account, as Penrose has suggested.
All you're saying is that if we knew exactly how humans work, we could build one. Seems like a tautology to me.
If I knew the exact quantum state of the Universe at the Big Bang, I could figure out exactly how the Universe evolved, but that's never going to happen either.
I think the complete reverse engineering the way you are describing will not be possible. We can only try to reproduce the same outputs for the same inputs. But I don't think we'll be able to fully define what happens in the black box in between.
We might come up with something that works similarly, and can do great things with it, but I don't think AI can be invented the way you are describing.
What you describe is a very high-dimensional non-linear system. We don't have the mathematical tools 'know' such systems. We 'know' a system when we can describe it by a much simpler (preferably mathematical) model. This is why linear systems are easy - we have mathematical tools to break it down to simpler parts (reductionism) and then understand the whole.
If the best we can do with the brain is simulate it at the the level of connectome/neurons/synapses/ thereby creating a system as complex as the brain - then do we really 'know' it ?