From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2006 - 10:32:28 MDT
On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 09:07:20AM -0700, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
wrote:
> Philip Goetz wrote:
> >My intuition, based on experience with how much computational
> >power it takes to solve a problem of a particular size, and on
> >Rescher's law of logarithmic returns, is that
> >exponentially-increasing computational power is required to
> >provide linear increase in "smartness", or some measure of the
> >problems we can handle. For instance, finding primes of 2N bits
> >takes much more than twice the computational power of finding
> >primes of N bits.
> >
> >I also expect that the computational complexity of cognition is
> >an exponential function of the size of working memory, so that if
> >we currently have a working memory that can store 5 chunks, the
> >amount of computation available in the universe limits us to some
> >double-digit number of chunks.
>
> As we all know, humans required thousands of much times as much
> brain tissue as chimpanzees to produce only a small increment in
> performance; if you look around on the street, you can easily see
> that each additional 10 IQ points requires a rough doubling of
> cranial volume. If you still think the ascent of AIs will be
> rapid, a further caution is provided by the evolutionary history
> of the hominid family: After requiring only 50,000 years to go
> from Australopithecus to late Homo erectus, it then required
> another five million years to produce Homo sapiens. Most of what
> we think of as impressive benefits and major impacts of "human"
> intelligence, such as guns and nuclear weapons, were invented by
> monkeys twenty million years ago. Our closest cousins, the
> chimpanzees, have most human abilities - including combinatorial
> language, machines with moving parts, and crude scientific
> journals - which also suggests that it is unlikely for any
> particular AI project to get many major abilities in advance of
> other AI projects. The ongoing military and economic competition
> between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals has stalemated for millennia;
> slight improvements in brainpower simply do not amount to all that
> much in the real world.
This.
Is.
Beautiful.
It needs to be put up on the web somwhere, so I can point people to
it.
I've never edited the SL4 Wiki before, so I'm scared to put it there
(don't want to step on people's toes).
-Robin
-- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/ Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their Grate!" Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://intelligence.org/
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