Why Artificial Intelligence Will Happen and Ray Kurzweil

Hello, sorry I just posted this as a response in another thread but id like some constructive feedback from other members on this forum so im being bold and giving myself my own thread as I think some people are in the dark in regards to our current understanding and state of technology.

You should check out a guy called Ray Kurzweil who works for IBM, absolutely fascinating stuff, he made a documentary not so long ago called 'transcedent man' it's excellent

It's simple and complicated, it will happen. Every year the spacial resolution of brain scanning doubles, if you take a physical picture of an environment and put it in to a computer what is happening, based on the computers power and storage you are trying to best represent that picture in a digital environment, however because of this the picture of a real environment can never be completely replicated perfectly, only best represented, the same goes for sound, this is why some people believe vinyl sounds better than digital music, the ear may or may not be able to detect this, however it is a fact that the vinyl contains an infinite amount more information than the digital representation of that information such as a cd or a hard disk etc.

With a brain, it is simply a massive network of neurons that deliver eletrical signals. With resolution which is what i described earlier with pictures, the same goes for pictures of the brain, if you take a picture of a brain with a camera, you have what looks like a brain, if you take a more detailed picture you can see it might be wet, veiny etc. If you take another picture you might see some neurons, eventually by taking a picture large enough (remember resolution) you will eventually have a digital picture of every single neuron EVER developed in that brain and exactly how they all connect.

Once you have a picture of every single neuron connection in a brain, containing an incredible but not infinite amount of information and a computer powerful enough and with enough storage space to contain that picture, using quantum printed circuits, that is a circuit created by an electron microscope which have already been created, you can with the right tools print every single neuron and every single neuron connection in that picture on to an extremely small circuit. Once printed, with the right stimulation this circuit can operate, it is that simple.

Take a massive resolution picture of a brain and print it on to a circuit.

What must be taken into consideration is the human brain and it's neuron connection's have massive distances between neurons relative to how small circuits can actually be created, by printing this on to a circuit you remove that space between the neurons allowing electrical impulses to be transmitted over vastly smaller distances resulting in extremely fast operating speeds, trillions of times faster than that of an ordinary brain, once newly found materials such as carbon nano-tubes are incorporated into a circuit like this, there is little to no heat in a circuit such as this due to the lack of resistance in conventional circuits, this means that you could pump a nuclear power station into a circuit like this and it wouldn't generate any heat, taking into consideration how many individual electrons can be fit down a wire.

With all these factors taken into consideration, using a quantum computer to power a circuit such as this which would be much smaller than a human brain, it would run infinitely fast, this raises some strange questions because the software (circuit) being run (by a quantum computer - flipping an atom up and down to represent 1's and 0's) would 'think' so ridiculously fast it could be considered a god, it would think of every conceivable outcome to a situation in practically no-time what so ever, it would be your brain only it would think trillions of times faster than you are currently capable, think of it in terms of learning speed as a baby being born and it within mere moments having acquired enough knowledge to be Einstein (If given input), this being would be SUPREME.

In regards to consciousness, it is a tough question as it is subjective to our own experiences, if you take every neuron in your brain and replicate it, it is you absolutely but based on human experience it is impossible to understand what it would be like to be or become another person, the reality of it is, it is a duplicate of you, it isn't you, i.e. if this circuit is operating and your alive, what do you expect to happen? To all of a sudden get two screens? four eyeballs, 2 in each body? It makes no sense because the two systems aren't connected. If you die and this circuit replaces you a conundrum occurs, your dead, there's no soul, spirit or ghost so your dead and you will never be alive again, your experience is OVER. Your duplicate who is another person containing your information will be you as if you just continued in that body, it will like you've been stolen by someone who believes he is and was you, knowing what you had learned, he will say he's you, he will say he remembers the experiment AND he did remember it, but it is a new 'consciousness' or whatever you want to call it where you are dead and gone and he is none the wiser to his new consciousness.

Again just a long-time lurker of ats, sorry if this is in the wrong category, im a newbie at creating threads.

Sorry for the bump.

reply to post by Mr Zeropoint


Well, this model kinda presupposes that consciousness is or can be strictly biochemical. There is a fair amount of research now pointing at molecular and quantum level computation as being an integral part of the process. For that to work, you're going to need several orders of magnitude finer resolution that discussed here.

And if the quantum really is involved, you're probably going to need good, special purpose, quantum processors just to make it all work.

But yeah, kurtzweil is interesting.