on artificial intelligence
"For nearly as long as we’ve attempted to create "thinking" computers, researchers have argued about the way they should run. Should they imitate how we imagine the mind to work, as a Cartesian wonderland of logic and abstract thought that could be coded into a programming language? Or should they instead imitate a drastically simplified version of the actual, physical brain, with its web of neurons and axon tails, in the hopes that these networks will enable higher levels of calculation? It’s a dispute that has shaped artificial intelligence for decades...
The largest neural nets today have about a billion connections, 1,000 times the size of a few years ago. But that’s tiny compared with the brain. A billion connections is a cubic millimeter of tissue; in a brain scan, it’d be less than a voxel. We’re far from human intelligence. Hinton remains intrigued and inspired by the brain, but he knows he’s not recreating it" (Chronicle of Higher Ed, Feb.23, 2015; by P. Voosen)
The largest neural nets today have about a billion connections, 1,000 times the size of a few years ago. But that’s tiny compared with the brain. A billion connections is a cubic millimeter of tissue; in a brain scan, it’d be less than a voxel. We’re far from human intelligence. Hinton remains intrigued and inspired by the brain, but he knows he’s not recreating it" (Chronicle of Higher Ed, Feb.23, 2015; by P. Voosen)