Thinking about the hardware of thinking: Can disruptive technologies help us achieve uploading?
November 30, 2010 by Suzanne Gildert
As we begin to run larger and more brain-like emulations, will our current methods of simulating neural networks, using general-purpose silicon processors, be enough, even in principle? As we wish to run computations faster and more efficiently, we might we need to consider if the design of the hardware that we all take for granted is optimal.
Suzanne Gildert: working on applications of quantum hardware
In a presentation (at Teleplace, produced online by teleXLR8 on November 28, part of the Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM) series), I discussed the recent return to a focus on co-design — designing specialized software algorithms running on specialized hardware — and how this approach may help us create much more powerful applications in the future.
As an example, I discussed some possible ways of running AI algorithms on novel forms of computer hardware, such as superconducting quantum computing processors. These behave entirely differently to our current silicon chips, and help to emphasize just how important disruptive technologies may be to our attempts to build intelligent machines.
teleXLR8 is a telepresence community for cultural acceleration. It “produces online events, featuring first-class content and speakers, with the best system for e-learning and collaboration in an online 3D environment.”
Comments (2)
by Brian H
typo: “These thought experiments …”
by Brian H
“Uploading” is not mentioned in the text, not sure where that came from. If it refers to “consciousness transfer” to hardware, there’s a huge caveat: duplicating a pattern is not transfer. The only mode I’d consider personally is a small stepwise process, gradually shifting with no loss of continuity.
Here’s the thing: if a block “transfer” is done, and you ask the new being if it’s the same “person” it was before, it may/must answer affirmatively no matter what, because that’s all it knows and remembers. But consider the cases where the original is not destroyed in the process, and disputes the new being, and where a double copy is made with both convinced they are the true “person”. These though experiments demonstrate that block consciousness transfer is a myth and illusion.