michaelanissimov

Comment Threads

• brucecohenpdx commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  But that's got nothing to do with uploading; you haven't recorded the brain state and used it to instantiate a new individual in a new substrate. You've just stopped and restarted brain activity from a state stored implicitly in the original brain. Uploading is quite a different problem with a different (and much more complicated) set of requirements. The idea behind slice and dice, as originally explained by Moravec, is that you duplicate each synapse, creating an artificial replacement that is dynamically identical as regards neural operation and insert it in place of the original1. So the brain will, supposedly,...
• Charlie Stross commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  headdesk * No, I'm NOT saying "consciousness can only come about as the result of evolutionary adaptation". Rather, what I'm saying is that consciousness, in our machines, is an undesirable trait -- consciousness is inefficient and not terribly useful -- so is likely to be avoided in most practical applications. Consciousness is just a monitoring/journalling mechanism that allows an entity to use theory of mind (useful for interacting with other entities) to model its own behaviour retrospectively. High level, expensive, doesn't actually aid decision making most of the time: from the point of view of a designer building a...
• Charlie Stross commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  Yes, that's pretty much what I'm getting at. Human-like conscious AI is a neat trick, like making a muscle-powered ornithopter: but it's not much use for the AI equivalent of ferrying 400 passengers across the Pacific at high subsonic speeds....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  @ 377, 378 Exactly - but this is what I was predicting at the end of my post @ 369 ... @ 379 Surely we will start, not with mice, but LOBSTERS? D. Brin Which just goes to show what utter shits the catholic church is and are .... REPEAT: There are TWO SEPARATE ISSUES under discussion here, not necessarily related at all to each other. Is a BigS likely &/or possible? my answer is YES Is uploading likely &/or possible? my answer is almost certainly not. Third question: - is increasingly sophisticate machine/computer/human augmentation-and-interaction likely? YES And, this MAY...
• Charlie Stross commented on Three arguments against the singularity
  We seem to be having a bit of a spam attack right now. Older threads now closing!...