Comments on: The singularity: when machines become conscious http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/18/the-singularity-when-machines-become-conscious/ EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:39:45 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Gokmop http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/18/the-singularity-when-machines-become-conscious/comment-page-1/#comment-22377 Gokmop Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:47:20 +0000 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=1526#comment-22377 Machine intelligence may one day happen, but the idea that it will happen as a result of increasing machine speed is absurd. Just because you have a huge amount of processing power doesn't mean that you can effectively mimic the architecture of the brain to use that CPU power and create consciousness. Nobody right now has an implementable idea of real, complete consciousness. It's just not the case that CPU power is holding us back. We just don't know how to do it. Faster machines isn't going to fix that. What would fix it is somebody making a real leap to discover how the brain really works, and what the relationship is between firing neurons and "consciousness". The brain just isn't as simple as an automata in the computer science sense. Honestly, does anybody believe you can simply throw hardware at this problem to fix it? You might get so much machine power in one place (one day) that you can crack 2048-bit RSA in under a second, and still not have the first idea how to create consciousness. Machine intelligence may one day happen, but the idea that it will happen as a result of increasing machine speed is absurd. Just because you have a huge amount of processing power doesn’t mean that you can effectively mimic the architecture of the brain to use that CPU power and create consciousness.

Nobody right now has an implementable idea of real, complete consciousness. It’s just not the case that CPU power is holding us back. We just don’t know how to do it. Faster machines isn’t going to fix that.

What would fix it is somebody making a real leap to discover how the brain really works, and what the relationship is between firing neurons and “consciousness”. The brain just isn’t as simple as an automata in the computer science sense.

Honestly, does anybody believe you can simply throw hardware at this problem to fix it? You might get so much machine power in one place (one day) that you can crack 2048-bit RSA in under a second, and still not have the first idea how to create consciousness.

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