The term "substrate" comes up often in discussions about AI, especially in the context of comparing AI to biological intelligence.  The meaning of the term is pretty straightforward: the substrate is the hardware that embodies a particular intelligence.  Human intelligence, then, runs on a meat substrate: all the neurons that make up the human ( Read more... )

Imagine that you want to colonize Alpha Centauri. Your task is daunting, but it's conceptually fairly straightforward: you're gonna need propulsion systems, life support, radiation shielding, power sources, etc. Some of those individual problems may be very hard, but it's clear what they are, and in every case, there's a pretty obvious starting ( Read more... )

In my original post on this topic, I opined that AI developers should in general regard each other as collaborators, not as competitors. I'd like to expand on that claim, and to demonstrate that even developers who are solely motivated by selfish considerations will find that the best way to achieve their goals is to collaborate with their ( Read more... )

There are two basic approaches to building an AI. The traditional approach is to write an artificial intelligence from scratch. A less sophisticated but perhaps more tractable approach is to simply simulate the workings of an actual human brain. For a variety of reasons that I'll detail below, I don't think this is the best approach, but I ( Read more... )

I've been promising for a while now that I'd talk a bit about my recent Optical Character Recognition project. I spent a few months last fall working on a simple OCR project, and although I never finished it, I learned a great deal from it (which was the point of the whole exercise). I chose OCR for a number of reasons:
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I recently made the pretty standard claim that the computational capacity of the human brain is equivalent to that of 5,000,000 modern PCs. There are probably many ways of building an AI that require a great deal less power than that. However, it's very likely that that level of power will be readily available within a few decades, and it's ( Read more... )

How hard would it be to build a human-level AI?

One interesting way of looking at this problem is to examine how hard it would be to run a computer simulation of a human brain.
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In The Language InstinctStephen Pinker notes that linguists use the term "listeme" to refer to ( Read more... )

From the SIAI newsletter:

Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has ( Read more... )

My two favorite AI books:
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker

The best basic theory I've found about how the brain works.  In a nutshell, Pinker argues for a relatively large number of specialized modules, each optimized for solving particular kinds of problems.  There's nothing revolutionary in this book, but it's an excellent synthesis of much ( Read more... )