X-Message-Number: 14927
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 00:57:53 +0100
From: Henri Kluytmans <>
Subject: Re: Simulating People and Animals

Pat Clancy wrote :

>The AI proponents have been claiming for decades that they'll soon achieve a 
>breakthrough, and it never happens. IMHO it never will happen, the Turing 

A couple of decades ago they still assumed that AI could best be 
developed using a heuristics approach. At the moment the connectionist 
approach (i.e. neural nets) looks more promising. Also the computing 
and storage capacity was never enough. 

Furthermore what happened in the past can never be used as an 
argument for what will happen in the future. Somebody in the 
1955 could just as well have said : "Space travel proponents 
have been claiming for decades that man will go to space, and 
it never happens."

>We will never have HAL running on a computer, not even by 20,001.

So you claim it will take more than 18,000 years to develop human 
(or more) equivalent AIs...   Hmm,...  (sigh)

>I hope that some other form of substrate can be developed that can support 
>an artificial mind. But this will depend on our achieving some degree of 
>understanding of how the mind works. Currently we have _no idea_ how the 
>mind works. 

We do not have to know how the mind works to be able to develop 
an artificial substrate. We only have to know how it's building 
blocks function (i.e. the neurons). See my other postings.
(Of course, this is a simplified statement...)

>To go back to computers, but only as an analogy: it's as if you 
>were given a computer, and you could observe it and run programs, 
<snip>
>certainly couldn't infer anything about even the lowest level 
>virtual machine with your voltmeter. 

If you could use a microscope and a voltmeter, and if you 
would have multiple computers that you could take apart and 
analyse piece by piece, then somebody could certainly infer 
everything, especially at the lowest levels. (Assuming that 
that somebody would have a certain level of understanding of 
physics.) You could start for example by analysing the 
circuits on the CPU, and find out that the transistors 
form logic circuits ... etc.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14927