Will Computers Outsmart Humans In 40 years?

Erm, this is one thing we have exactly in common with a computer, we have a limited storage capacity that CAN get full and CAN be errased.

You think people with Altsheimers or amnesia(be it medical or trough a bump on the head) have lost part of their soul or something?

The brains storage isn't that huge either, but we have the ability to use sets of information to virtualy recreate a memory scape in our minds.

We don't store video or audio.
We store the sound patern of ones voice and what is said and recreate in our mind the thing that was said by a person.

Same goes for visual memory's. We know the features of someones face, we know their body tone and measurements, we know the setting the memory happend in(dude was standing next to a red lawn chair sipping at a budweiser beer) and recreate the scene of that memory from the information we have stored.

This is one of the things that have been worked on massivly over the last few years, mainly for security installations, facial, body and audio recognition.

When these technologies really mature it would be able to alow computers to fully recognize people with a minimal data set. By just recollecting the geometrie of the face, color of the eyes and so on.

It would also be able to recreate entire movies with nothing but raw text and mathematical data instead of having to capture the entire movie at 30, 25 or 23 FPS.

I'm a believer of the Holographic Brain theory so i don't believe the human brain has a limitation on storage at all.

As far as computers outsmarting us I can't see it happening unless technology alters substantially and we start using biological computers or something.

On a pure calculations standpoint yes but on an intelligence standpoint no.

One flaw in this thread. Computers always crash lol But seriously no-one knows what the future will hold. We may be stuck at our current level of technology until a new source of energy is found like cold fusion

Originally posted by spartan433
One flaw in this thread. Computers always crash lol

But seriously no-one knows what the future will hold. We may be stuck at our current level of technology until a new source of energy is found like cold fusion

Incorrect, technological growth is speeding up. It is not dependant on energy, it's dependant on money and ingenuity.

[edit on 3-11-2005 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by spartan433
One flaw in this thread. Computers always crash lol

But seriously no-one knows what the future will hold. We may be stuck at our current level of technology until a new source of energy is found like cold fusion

I'd say that brains crash and shortcut quite regularly too.

Originally posted by spartan433
One flaw in this thread. Computers always crash lol

Solution: Mac OS X

Originally posted by masterp

You see the thread title? Why would you assume we would have the same technology in 40 years considering Moore's law and all ....

Because the Moore's law (which is not a law at all, just an observation) will stop being valid in a few years, when transistors can not be made smaller than a few nanometers.

We need a totally different kind of technology, which we don't have any clue of right now.

Self-learning neural nets.

Self-learing neural nets are not programming languages. We need ways to program those ultra-fast brains to make the calculations we want.

Moore's law wont go out for a while... AMD is gonna go quad core not too long from now... and Intel plans on 35nm chips in the near future - they are already producing the 65nm Cedar Mills core Pentium 4's - Prescott 90nm cores shrunken.
It is true, you can't make transistors smaller than like 25nm, but, you can always make a bigger chip if you want more transistors

We must not forget the part that makes us human.

The will to survive. Our dreams about the future. The decision to take a risk despite the odds against it. This is a part of being human. Without the human spirit, a machine is a machine. And it took "us" to put our machines here, they didn't put themselves here.

But this does not negate the usefullness of machines though, they can be a great help to us. A machine can wash my car, but I don't want a machine to try and get me a date for Saturday night....

Troy

Originally posted by cybertroy
Computers will continue to be usefull to us, but unless you inject a soul into the machine, it will not be the same as a human. You may have an analitical wonder, but you won't have a human.

Ah the Ghost in the Shell The soul is a very abstract concept. What we call a soul may very well be the direct by-product of Self awareness. Could a machine that became self aware not develop its on sense of a soul.

I do agree future AI robots will never be like exactly like humans. Humans are just too imperfect IMHO once machines start designing machines they will take off in ways we couldnt dream of. They have the potential to be far superior then humans in just about every way. The creations will surpass the creators.

Originally posted by cybertroy
Every moment of our lives is stored in our memory, yet no more physical space is taken up for storage. Has anyone seen anyone come out of years of college with a larger skull? Unless the skull was still growing I doubt it. Something to think about.
Troy

We dont even fully understand how memories work yet. Every moment may be stored but alot of the info we can never access again. I know I cant remember what I eat for lunch on oct. 12 1985.

If the human brain was simple to undestand we would be too simple to understand it

They have the potential to be far superior then humans in just about every way.

This is how I would phrase this sentance.

They have the potential to be far superior then presant day humans in just about every way.

Future species decendant from Humanity could have powers equal to or even exceeding that of an Artificial lifeform.

Shadow,

It's amazing what you can remember from the past.

Troy

Originally posted by Astronomer68

Originally posted by masterp

Computers will never reach humans. The human brain has 300 billion synapsies, i.e. connections between processing elements...it is impossible to make a network/cluster/multicore with so many connections.

Nature did it, why can't we? Granted the number of interconnections is extremely large, but there is nothing mysterious about them.

We maybe able to do it some day, but not with digital technology. It is not possible to make a neural net of 300 billion connections with digital technology, no matter how small silicon gates become. The human brain is organic and analog.

This is an extremely important conversation, but it is a little premature, because we don't have the technology to do anything serious. I was watching the Star Trek episode 'the measure of a main' where Lt Cmr Data is supposed to be turned off so it can be studied by a scientist. In Star Trek - the next generation, humanity is on the eve of making artificial humans. Data has a positronic brain, which actually means nothing, but it is implied that Data's brain is able to simulate an organic brain by containing billions of connections.

Lt Data has 800 quadrillion bits capacity, that is 88 petabytes. Data's linear processing speed is 60 terraflops. There is no way in reality to make a digital circuit that is that fast. Supercomputers may have more terraflops of power, but it is not linear, but distributed. Blue Gene, the IBM supercomputer, has 183 terraflops speed, but it is a multiprocessor machine. According to wikipedia, Lt Data's storage capacity is 17 times that of Google.

So in order to make an artificial human, imaginary technology must be used. Google has over 10,000 machines for storing the information. Imagine all that information in the space that a human brain takes, possibly interlinked with any other information! we are talking about truly fantastic things, not capable with current and future digital technology.

Well, if computers become self-aware and start trying to kill us all then:

1) We install failsafes, self-destructs etc.
2) Law of Robotics
3) EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) which since our civillisation almost entirely relies on computers would kill us as well as them.

Also, Computers are practically our slaves and throughout history slaves have rebelled and won their freedom



[edit on 6/11/05 by Atomix]

Humans do alot of misstakes and stupid things. Computers do exactly what they are told to do 100% of the cases, they never fail. If something goes wrong, it's always due to human error. When computers can program them selfs though, better look out...!