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Comment by rymith | Hacker News Reader

You are missing a fundamental key difference. There is no profit in reaching the stars. Besides that, there are also no barriers that come close to the issues with the Physics and energy requirements of space travel. Unlike a warp drive which we don't even know is possible, the human brain is an actual physical device that exists, and simply uses chemicals as it's logic gates and transistors. We both run on electricity.

I'm a biologist by schooling, and a programmer by occupation. So I understand the science on both sides, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And it's coming a lot sooner than people think.

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  > And it's coming a lot sooner than people think.

This is an indicator you hardly understan the science behind it. We barely have any understanding how brain works, so even if singularity is possible it is very very far away.

Broad understanding of how the brain functions it not necessary (and would not be sufficient) to replicate it. To make a model of a brain that runs on a computer, we only need to be able to replicate it's basic building blocks, and then copy the structure of a brain over.

The basic technologies to do this already exist, and are presently used to reverse engineer microchips (among other things). What you do is first freeze a brain, and then carefully slice a few micrometers off the top. Then record all the connections between neurons in the top layer. Slice another layer off and continue.

This would take a very long time, and cost hundreds of billions. It would not, however, require any advancement in technology over our present level. The key technology we presently lack is a computing substrate sufficient to run the simulated brain.

That's one approach, but I don't think there's any evidence that you would end up with a working brain at the end, let alone a copy of the individual you started with. And good luck finding a volunteer. :)

The brain's functionality is not just due to the physical connections between neurons, it's the chemical and electrical connections as well, operating on various simultaneous levels (that is, the frequency of firing as well as the strength of firing of neurons matters). A frozen brain isn't working, and you need to copy all that stuff too, and the technology to do that doesn't exist. We can barely measure it, let alone reproduce it.

I don't think you can say that a thorough understanding of all those multiple levels of complexity in the brain just isn't necessary. I really don't think it is that easy.

To make a physics analogy, I don't need to understand gas laws to reproduce them by simulating newtonian mechanics.

Someone might have said the same thing about molecular biology before watson+crick. Neuroscience has been growing with leaps and bounds in the past decade, and, exactly because it is still in its infancy there are very significant low hanging fruit to be discovered as visualization and stimulation techniques are improving and are employed to scale. It actually does look like we will be able to figure out how our brain works in a decade (decades?). Once that is figured out, we already have the computer framework to do massive simulations of the brain.

Allen himself is funding a Brain research institute, so one wonders why he's pessimistic about the future of neuroscience.

I bet, at least one brain behind the many eyes reading this, knows how human minds work - at least the significant functions.

Hey, I am talking to you! Time to speak out loud! Tell us how you function.

How we work is completely irrelevant to reaching a singularity. These arguments are like talking about how we will need only a few computers as large as cities to handle our needs or the making of OS/2 out of intel assembly.

When we have a github of standardized computations and deep learning (or evolutionary) algorithms that pull it together with no human intervention we will have the singularity. Then it can try to figure us out or do something useful instead.

It wont look magical, it wont take a huge market force, it wont answer your religious questions or guess what you are thinking... But it will change how we approach and automate solutions to what are currently intellectual problems. Reality is always mundane.

Well, that statement was a lot more correct even just a few years ago. But we're starting to get a much better grasp on it. In the past 10 years or so we have learned more about how the brain functions than in all of human history. It's true, we're not yet experts, but you're making the assumption that we need to know entirely how the human brain works in order to build something that supersedes it in capability, and this is simply untrue. I don't need to know anything about how a gasoline engine works to build a faster and more efficient electrical engine. In truth, such thinking may even impinge on my ability to do so. The singularity isn't about creating a human brain in chips, it's about a point when the chips are able to process more than our brains are capable. What forms that takes and consequence of that is simply unforeseeable. Simple math proves it's coming.

I'm sorry, I mean no disrepect, but the idea that because you are a programmer by occupation doesn't really mean you understand what it would take bring about the sort of rapture predicted by Kurzweil.

Last night I read several posts on HN about people calling themselves "hackers" or "programmers" because they played with Wordpress and learned a little Javascript on a YouTube. This is not to be elitist but I think claiming expertise on this topic requires a little more insight than what is passing for being a "programmer" these days.

And you're somewhat wrong, I think. There is no reason inherently that traveling "to the stars" has to be unprofitable. In fact, many of those predictions about colonization the parent discussed, usually had some sort of capitalist profit driven motive. The pace of "accelerating progress" could manifest a cheap means of such travel. I don't know that speculative physics about faster than light travel (warping space-time, etc) is any more unrealistic than some of these prognostications about AI and spiritual transcendence, whatever that is.

But honestly, responding to this post sort of reminds of responding to Way of the Master type people anyway. :)

And it's not just a matter of profit. In fact, the research for the achievement of superhuman intelligence must hijack the ordo cognoscendi and jump in front of the line, because with superhuman intelligence humans can leave the rest of science to machines (hopefully).

>There is no profit in reaching the stars.

There's no profit in the singularity either.

There's stupendous profit in every small incremental step towards it. AI research in general has proven to be unbelievably profitable -- even when you fail in your goals (like most AI research to date), every minor partial result can probably be turned into a multimillion business.

Before the AI winter, there was a lot of criticism of how the US govt spent a lot of money on a lot of projects which fizzled out. One of the results built from the ashes of those DARPA projects was the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, used to optimize and schedule transportation of supplies and personnel.

From wikipedia: Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined.

Imagine having a computer that would have the same level of cognition as a human. I think most people would disagree with you on that not being valuable.

You might not want to pay to have your brain preserved to perpetuity, but I'm pretty sure that some would.

Strong AI would could potentially dwarf all past profits, you're simply not correct.

Are you kidding? Because I don't want to be a jerk, but you cannot have possibly thought that through.

Actually he is correct, if everything is virtualized (and therefore abundant) , then the price of everything drops to zero.

True if everybody has access to strong AI. I doubt that is the way it will play out. At least at the beginning. Whomever invents it first will probably hoard it for themselves as an advantage against everybody else. The technology will eventually spread to everybody else but by that time our economy will probably have adapted.

You're a little unclear as to why it's called the singularity. It means a point so drastically different that we cannot predict what the world will look like after it happens. However, should a planet still exist on the day after this occurs, you can pretty much guarantee that the company that controls this technology will make Apple, Google, and Microsoft look like technological infants. Well, unless it is Google, which seems to be the play they are making by hiring RK.

Also, World of Warcraft is virtualized, and everything in that game is potentially infinitely abundant. And yet, it still seems to pull in billions. So...

Yes, but my point is essentially that talking about profits in a post singularity world is probably as sensible as talking about Mao as CEO of China. After the singularity we will likely have a different socio-economic system and profits will probably be something like a noble rank is today.

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