Hacker News Reader

Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

His fundamental assumption that change will continue to follow an exponential curve because that's what it's doing now seems highly suspect to me. The problems you have to solve become exponentially more difficult as your tools become exponentially more powerful.

The human mind is the product of billions of years of parallel computation and experimentation. Raw horsepower is probably the easy part.

View on HN

These two podcasts, http://twit.tv/fib52, http://twit.tv/fib55, of an interview with Rahul Sarpeshkar discussing Ultra Power Bioelectronics provide a good summary of current knowledge on how the brain works. There is a decent understanding of how many areas computationally function. The biggest surprises were that the brain is a hybrid digtal/analog computer and something similar jpeg compression is in operation in the brains visual system

But he's not saying "Because that's what it's doing now", he's saying "because that's what it's always done".

Human / animal muscles are also the product of billions of years of experimentation, and a few decades of steam power research trounced them with ease. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's inherently incredibly good and hard to replicate.

Simple biological systems like bones/muscles evolved long ago and have mostly just been refined since then. Human-like intelligence is a much more recent and much more difficult development.

A lot of people seem to think that if you build a machine of sufficient raw horsepower that intelligence will magically emerge. Maybe, but I suspect it's not nearly so easy.

Kurzweil is not one of these people.

In fairness, central nervous systems didn't crop up until circa half a billion years ago. But, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com