POTUS Notices That The Singularity Is Near
One of the key things that needs to happen before technology reaches what's been known in recent years as "the Singularity" is a far better understanding of the human brain that would allow us to essentially reverse engineer the root of human intelligence.
President Obama today, perhaps because he wants to follow in the footsteps of Kennedy's challenge to land a man on the moon or Clinton's support of the Human Genome Project, announced an initiative to map the circuits and connections within the brain, much as the genomes of humans and other organisms have been mapped.
Of course, the main reason for President Obama's interest in the project is medical research. But such an endeavor also has vast implications for computing and artificial intelligence, the very areas that will bring about the Singularity.
The average human brain contains fourteen times as many neurons as the human population of Earth, although some brains -- Donald Trump's, for example -- have considerably less. Add to this the countless billions of interconnections between neurons and the interdependencies among them and it's easy to see how the brain can be thought of as hopelessly complex.
But the key question is whether this is really irreducible complexity or just a matter of a limited number of patterns being repeated a large number of times. Author Ray Kurzweil is skeptical that the brain is as complex as it appears, something he discusses at length in his latest book "How to Create a Mind".
President Obama today, perhaps because he wants to follow in the footsteps of Kennedy's challenge to land a man on the moon or Clinton's support of the Human Genome Project, announced an initiative to map the circuits and connections within the brain, much as the genomes of humans and other organisms have been mapped.
Of course, the main reason for President Obama's interest in the project is medical research. But such an endeavor also has vast implications for computing and artificial intelligence, the very areas that will bring about the Singularity.
The average human brain contains fourteen times as many neurons as the human population of Earth, although some brains -- Donald Trump's, for example -- have considerably less. Add to this the countless billions of interconnections between neurons and the interdependencies among them and it's easy to see how the brain can be thought of as hopelessly complex.
But the key question is whether this is really irreducible complexity or just a matter of a limited number of patterns being repeated a large number of times. Author Ray Kurzweil is skeptical that the brain is as complex as it appears, something he discusses at length in his latest book "How to Create a Mind".