The Age of Spiritual Machines
Not long ago The Singularity is Near
Kurzweil is probably the most prominant futurist around at the moment, predicting the ever approaching radical changes that are coming our way this century. He has had some success in his educated predictions before, and has founded multiple companies based on inventions he was responsible for. So basically what I’m saying is that he is not a crack pot, which is important to keep in mind because he deals with alot of ideas that would be unsettling to the public of the present day.
AoSM talks alot about AI, specifically 3 paradigms he thinks are important to its inception: recursive programming, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. While these all have their use he makes it all sound so simple. But I guess this isn’t a flaw since this is popular science, and the thing that the book does best is get you enthused about the future. Immortality, abundance of resources, expanding your mind – all this can be yours… assuming you can last the next 20-30 years. This is probably why one of Ray’s other books is Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
Dr. Joel Pitt is part scientist, part software engineer, and fascinated with artificial intelligence and consciousness. He spends most of his time as a lead developer on the open-source AGI research framework OpenCog, but is involved in ecological modelling, bioinformatics, data visualisation, and assorted other projects too.
4 comments ↓
Neural networks and genetic algorithms for sure but recursive programming? Hey I know stack overflow is fun but am I missing something here!
Well – stack overflow could always be a problem but the aim is always to specify your end point properly so it doesn’t run forever. I suspect that for really powerful usage in AI, a executable system that allows recursive programming without pushing to the stack at every function call would be needed. Is that possible? I don’t know, and I’m too tired to think about it seriously
Haha being on the other side of the world strikes again! Why I can accuse all sorts of thing with you having to reply in the middle of the night
Certainly all your base belong to us.
ps. I read up on the recursive idea on Wikipedia and it makes some more sense – reduce function complexity by defining functions in terms of themselves. However I would expect this sort of thing to fall out as a higher level construct of a neural network or similar.
Certainly need all the reduction in function complexity that we can get when creating conscious machines!
BTW, my DNA analysis program using recursion – just for that reason. The recursive function itself is already damn fiddly.
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